Sunday, February 01, 2009

Creating Presentations With PowerPoint's PhotoAlbum Feature

By Andrew Whiteman

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.

Creating a presentation in this way makes use of a PowerPoint feature called Photo Album. To access this feature, click on New in the File menu. Next, in the New Presentation task pane which appears on the right of your screen, click on Photo Album.

Clicking on the Photo Album option displays a window in which you begin by choosing the images required for your presentation. Just click on the button labelled File/Disk and select the images. Alternatively, click on Camera/Scanner and load the images directly from your scanner or digital camera.

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.

In addition to the images, you will almost certainly want to add some text on each of the slides. From the drop-down menu marked Picture Layout, you can indicate your preferred slide setup: one, two or four images; with or without a title. There is also a check-box for you to choose whether your titles should be above or below the images.

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.

Finally, click OK to create the presentation. To finish it off, you just need to click in the title box of each slide and add your text. And that's it, a bona fide PowerPoint presentation automatically created from a bunch of images!

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