Instant PowerPoint Presentations Using The PhotoAlbum Feature

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.

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.

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 dialogue appears, your first task is to locate the images. Images can be loaded from disk or imported directly from a scanner or digital camera. To specify where your images are located, just click on File/Disk or Camera/Scanner as required.

Your images are imported and listed in alphabetical order. This is almost certainly not the order in which you want them to appear in your presentation. So the next step is to rearrange them by clicking on the arrow icons to move selected images up or down in the list. You can also remove images from the list by clicking the name of the image and clicking the Remove button.

Having got your images in the right order, you can turn your attention to the tonal values in each image. If any of them needs adjustments, you can do one of four operations by clicking the appropriate icon: increase contrast, lower contrast, increase brightness, lower brightness. There are two further icons which allow you to rotate the image clockwise or anti-clockwise.

However important a part your images will play in the presentation, every presentation will need some text. The Picture Layout drop-down menu lets you specify whether you want one, two or four images with a title. (You can omit the title, though it is unlikely you will wan to do so.) You can also place the title above or below the image.

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 it; you’ve finished. When you click OK, PowerPoint will create the presentation generating a separate slide for each image, using the settings that you specified in the Photo Album dialogue. The final touch is to go to each slide and type some text into the title box. Once you’ve done that, you have yourself a PowerPoint presentation. How painless is that!

The The writer of this article is a trainer and developer with Macresource Computer Solutions, a UK IT training company offering Microsoft PowerPoint training courses at their central London training centre.