PowerPoint presentations are a superb tool for getting a message across to an audience, to potential clients and to your own company and images are great for adding impact to a PowerPoint presentation. So much so that PowerPoint includes a feature that lets you automatically create a complete presentation from a group of images.
Naturally, creating a presentation in this way can only be done if the pictures relate very closely to the main content of your presentation. One example might be a presentation given during product training which requires detailed photographs of each product.
To get started you need to bring up the New Presentation task pane. To do this, choose File - New. Next, click on “Photo Album” in the New Presentation task pane window.
When the Photo Album window appears, you begin identifying the images you want included in the presentation. You can click on the button marked File/Disk to browse for the images or you can import them straight from your digital camera or scanner.
The imported images are ordered alphabetically, so you will almost certainly want to reorder them to coincide with the narrative of your presentation. This is achieved by selecting one or more images and clicking on the arrow icons to move them up or down in the order. You can also highlight one or more images and click Remove to delete them from the presentation.
Is the orientation of any of our images not quite right for this presentation? No problem. Just highlight the image then click on the rotate icon to change it. Not happy with the tonal qualities of an image? No problem. Click on the appropriate button to increase or decrease the contrast or brightness levels.
Not many presentations will consist solely of images. So the next step will be to specify the layout of text and images. The Picture Layout drop-down menu lets you choose one, two or four images per slide either with or without a title and a separate check-box lets you specify whether the title will be displayed below the image or above it.
If you wish, you can also change the shape of your images. This is done in a drop-down menu called Frame Shape. The default shape is rectangular but also available are rounded rectangle, bevelled, oval, corner tabs, square tabs and plaque tabs.
That’s pretty much it. Click OK to exit the Photo Album dialogue box and PowerPoint will go ahead and create your presentation using the images and parameters you just specified. Add some text into the title box on each slide and your presentation is good to go!