Sunday, February 1, 2009

Creating Presentations With PowerPoint's PhotoAlbum Feature

By Andrew Whiteman

Whether you are communicating with an audience, your colleagues at work or a group of clients or potential clients, a PowerPoint presentation is a great way of getting you message across. But did you know, you can base a PowerPoint presentation around a group of images and, what's even better, PowerPoint will create the presentation for you.

You can use the techniques described in this article whenever you have a group of images whose content are at the core of the presentation you need to create. One example might be giving a presentation to introduce a new range of products based around a series of product photos.

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 Photo Album window is very versatile. Once, you have imported your pictures, it allows you to reorder them by selecting and image and clicking on the up and down arrows. If you change your mind and decide to delete an image, no problem. Just click on the name of the image then click the Remove button.

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.

Next, there is the shape of the image. In the drop-down menu labelled Frame Shape, you can choose rounded rectangle, bevelled, oval, corner tabs, square tabs and plaque tabs. If you don't want anything fancy, just leave the shape set to the default value of rectangle.

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! - 15634

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