Computer Software Reviews

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.

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.

You begin by choosing New from the File menu which displays the New Presentation task pane on the right of your screen. In the New Presentation task pane window, you click on the option marked “Photo Album”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There is also an option to change what is referred to as the Frame Shape. The default is rectangle. However, the Frame Shape drop-down menu will also let you choose rounded rectangle, bevelled, oval, corner tabs, square tabs or plaque tabs.

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!