Transcripts
1. Mastering Images - Introduction: Hello, and welcome to the mastering images in PowerPoint course. In this course, I will give you simple, effective advice to help you get your message across. I will help show you that content is king. And the most effective presentations are simple and easy to follow. The course contains over two hours of practical and Clear Guides. to mastering the use of images. The aim is not to show off your PowerPoint skills with overly complex layout and animations, but to engage the audience and get your message across with maximum impact. Don't diminish your ability to tell a story with slides that are unnecessarily complicated or full of too much text or superfluous graphics. As simple and less cluttered presentation will mean your visual message will become more powerful. By providing you with useful, actionable tools and design tips that you can implement immediately. I can show you how to go from this to this, taking your presentation to the next level in a way that will wow your audience. As well as a great variety of effective material that audiences connect with others I have also seen n a lot of bad presentations. Once you've finished this course, you can avoid some of the common pitfalls of working with images, including stretching or squashing using the wrong images or using the images in a way that don't enhance your presentation. We will cover the fundamentals of how to use images and which images to choose. We will then provide you with a selection of tips and tricks on how to use images and take your images to the next level. So if you are ready, let's get started.
2. Part 1 - How to use images - Introduction: In how to use images, I will help you with the fundamentals of mastering images in PowerPoint. It will include using full-screen images, creating overlays for text and titles, cropping images to any size or shape and changing the color of images. We'll use simple examples to cover the basics of resizing, reshaping, and styling photos. We will start with various ways to use an image as a slide background. We will then cover altering the size and shape of any image without stretching it. The various styling tools and picture effects will also be covered. Badly used images look unprofessional and have a negative effect on engaging the audience. When use cleverly images can bring your presentations to life on help tell your story. All the PowerPoint files shown in this section, are available for you to download.
3. Using a full screen image as a title slide: Okay, so a great use for an image that I'm going to show you is how to make a high impact title slide. First of all, we're going go to insert pictures and choose a nice image that I've got from Unsplash. As you can see, the image isn't quite the right size. And this will be the case with most images. So we need to crop it to fit the ratio of the screen. To do this, we will go to picture format, crop and choose 16:9, which is the aspect ratio of most screens. And click off it and there, the image is cropped. Notice that some of the detail wasn't actually included in the crop. What you can do, just go to 16:9 and actually move the image inside the crop to the bit that you want. This bit looks good. I'm just going to scale the image up and you'll see that it snaps to the edge of the page. Preview the slideshow, you can see I've got a nice image there. Quite big, quite clear, quite bold. And now we're just going to add some text. And this is a good place to add text on this particular slide. So you can put, 'This is a bold title' to here. We'll make this white so we can see it. Choose a nicer font. Make it bold, and then make the whole thing bigger. And the bold title considerably bigger. So what we've got there is a nice title slide, nice and clear. Preview that, 'this is a bold title', looks great on the photo. Now for our second example, we're just going to pick another image. This image looks quite good. Again, we'll go to the Crop tool. Crop to aspect ratio of 16:9. In this case, that's perfect. Click off, it will snap up to the top left when it's dragged. And if you drag the bottom corner, it will click to the right. Don't ever resize it with the side handles because it can squash the image. Just press CTRL Z to undo. So now we're going to write some text on the front that says 'this is another bold title'. And make it white as before. Just going to make the section that is at the top not bold. And then a lot bigger. And we're going to centre this one. And align center. There we go. So you've got another bold title that works really well on an image. In this case, image could do with a tiny bit of darkening just for clarity. So we could click on the image. Choose picture format, go to color, picture color options, picture corrections, and turn the brightness down, by 30 percent. Okay, the image still looks good, but the clarity is much better and the contrast is improved. You can also go to the Format Settings by right-clicking on the picture using Format Picture. Then going back to the setting your in, picture corrections which is the fourth icon on the right hand.
4. Overlaying a colour panel for text: So, if the image that you want to use as a background is quite busy, text can be quite difficult to see. A good thing we can do here is add a colored panelled behind it to make the text a lot clearer, but still allow you to use the background. For this example, we can click on rectangle, drag out a rectangle here. We get a slightly nicer color. In this case with no outline. Send it one back, and there we go. You could also go to something like a gradient. Select a slightly nicer gradient. So we'll hit Play. You can see you've got a nice panel there which makes the background look good while still being able to read the title well. So for our second example, we're going to use a panel in the bottom left-hand corner. A circular one would look good here. So we can click on oval in the drawing panel. We can hold down shift as we draw it out. I will move it roughly into the right place, give it a better color. Put the gradient on as we did before, Give it a white outline, I would say 20 pt would look good here. And then we'll right-click, choose Send to Back, send backwards. And what you've got there, is a nice panel, but you can still see the nice image as well. So it looks really good. For our third example, we can darken a section of the slide. We can go to oval again, hold down shift to create a perfect circle. Then we can align it to the middle by going to arrange align center and arrange align middle. And we can make it black. This time we'll have no outline and will probably select the transparency at something like 30 percent, which will allow us to see through the background. And we'll right-click as we did before. Choose Send to Back, send backwards. And there you've got a nice title slide where you can see the background coming through, but the section's been darkened where the title is to make it clear.
5. Creating a full page photo background: Okay, so I'm now going to show you how to create a full-page photo background that looks great. Just go to Insert Picture. Take an image that I've got from Unsplash again. There we go, This image is in portrait and we want it to fill the whole screen. So we're just going to grab the rotate handles and hold down Shift as we turn it and it will snap to the correct rotation and drag it up into the top-left. Hold the corner, pull it out to full screen. Brilliant. Now I will grab the text that I've got for my title, that I've got in a slide here, but you can use any text. You see that looks good, but the contrast isn't great because the photo is quite busy, so it's quite difficult to read. So in this case, we can click on the image, go to Format Picture. Go to the brightness, minus it by about 40 to 50 percent. Great. Let's preview that. Here we go. That looks really good. Okay, for our second example, we're going to create a lighter version of this with dark text. So I'll just go onto our new slide. There's the text. We're going to take a copy of the image from the last slide as that was the right size. Paste it onto this, send it to the back of the slide by right-clicking and choose Send to Back. Then we will go into the Format Picture settings. We can reset the brightness and contrast because we don't want it darker on this one. And we can go to transparency and set it to approximately 85. See how that looks. Excellent, really good. For our third example, we're just going to take a nice color and use that as the panel overlay. So we'll go on to our third slide here. Again, we'll take a copy from the very first one that's got the image in at the right size. We'll paste it. Right-click send to back. We'll go into the Format Picture and reset the color. Now we're just going to draw a square over the whole thing. Make it a reasonable color. Change the outline to no outline. And if I right-click on this, send it to the back, then I click on the photo, right-click and choose Send to back. What I can do is take the panel and adjust the transparency to whatever I think looks good. In this case 20 percent looks nice. We'll just quietly play that. Excellent. A nice title slide that you can use in brand colors that has high impact and looks great.
6. Formatting the slide background: Another option for using a full-screen background is to use format background. This can be really useful as a quick way of formatting the background to save having to bring in an image as it will crop it and snap it to the edge of the frame for you. So if we right-click on the background and choose Format background, we can then go to picture or texture fill. This is the default. And then if we insert a picture, choose from file, and I'm going to click this one and see it automatically crops it and snaps it to the slide. So it's a full screen background. That looks great. We're now going to show you one example using a portrait image. Right-click choose Format Background, insert from a file, and now I'm going to choose this image here, which normally you'd have to do a lot of cropping and scaling up to fit. Just do insert, and it automatically takes up the exact size of the frame. And this looks good and it's not stretched. But to note, we cannot choose which parts of the image displays here, as PowerPoint automatically chooses the center, and crops it correctly for you. One thing that you can't on here, which is great, as you can see, this is a very busy image. and now the title doesn't stand out very well. If you right-click and choose format background, you can adjust any of these things like a picture corrections or picture color. So in this case, we might darken it down by say 45 percent so that you can still see it and then make the text white.
7. Cropping images to any size: So now we're going to show you how you can crop images to any size. We're just going to go to Insert Picture this device and choose the flower. And I'm going to show you how in this case the image doesn't really fit in that well. It'll be better if it was bigger and taller. So we'll just undo what we've got. And we'll put it roughly in the right place. Right-click. And we can choose crop. Now you can get these small black candles and when you drag them, they will actually snap to the area where there are other elements on the page or the edge of the page. So if we just track the right-hand one in, you can see it now snaps to the edge of the page. So when I click off it, there we go. You can also just go back into crop here. Once the elements are in the right place and the edges, you can actually pick up the image and drag it is necessary. So in this case, we might centre up a bit more. There we go. Excellent. And just click off it. You can see you have the slide in the perfect ratio and the perfect fit with crop. It's completely non-destructive, so this means you can go back and change it at anytime. For our second example, I've got a section over here, which would look quite good with three images. And I'm going to just add these pictures from this device again. And I'm going to pick these three images which would look good as tall, slim images in this particular slide design. So I'm first just going to select them all and just size them down a little bit so they're about the right height. There we go. Now I'm going to pick one of the images, and I'm just going to crop that until I've got it how I want it to look. So I can right-click, hit crop. Pull in the handle, take a bit off the top as well, in this case, just to make it look good, and click off it, there we go. So it would be good in this case to have all three look exactly the same height. So what we can do using the same method as before is we can click on the image, right-click on it, choose crop, and it'll actually snaps to the images underneath. So you can see as I drag it here, it will snap to that image. And I'll drag it in the right handle. And you can see again, it's going to snap to that. I can take the bottom, bring down on the top. So it snaps. And also, as we mentioned before, can then move it about inside to get whatever you think looks good. which I think is about like that, and then click off the image. There we go. You can also use, if we right-click and choose format picture. We can also go to the Crop tool here, which will allow you to type in the values if you choose to. So you can see that these two at the moment currently have those same size. And this one is a lot bigger. So for example, we could click on this one. We could say that's 579 wide. We could type 5.79 in here. And then it will suddenly be the same width. And to get the same height, we could look at that and say it's 14.93. Again, I'll type in there: 14.93. And there we go. You can use the same method again. We right-click and choose crop just to drag in the important part that you think looks best in the cropped area. Click off it. And there we go. I've got three cropped images that are ready good, all exactly the same size. So for our final example, we're just going to show you how I can crop an image into a screen, such as the one in this iMac here. Just go to insert pictures as before. We'll just select the flowers. And then we'll right-click, choose crop, we can just drag the handles down as required. Just pulling the left-handle here and the bottom, trying to get the same amount of black bezel in this case around the iMac. And then the right-hand side. Looks pretty good. And I will click off, there you go, image inside a screen. So one more variation. We can show you how to put it in an iPad screen. Just go to insert pictures as before. Pick the same image. Just a tiny bit, not wide enough, so we're just scaling it up very slightly. So we've got enough to work with. Then we can right-click hit crop as before, drag the image handled down. And you can see the image below is, so you know roughly where you're aiming for, it always be adjusted after this if required. I think about there. Go to the left handle. Pull it in. You can see the image that is underneath the screen. There we go. Pull the right handle in and then pick up the bottom one as the final one. I think that just needs a tiny bit more. There we go. Excellent. So we'll click off it. And you can see you've got the perfect image nicely put into an iPad screen.
8. Cropping images to any shape: So I'm now going to show you how you can crop to any shape as images in PowerPoint don't have to be rectangular. Just insert three images here to give us something to work with. Just going to scale them down a bit to make them a bit more manageable. Going to pick the first one here, go to the Crop tool. And under here it says cropped to shape and aspect ratio. So in this case, wanna make three circles. So I'm gonna go to Aspect ratio One-to-one, which will make a perfect square. I'm gonna go back to the crop tool and choose crop to shape, oval. And there we go. Perfect circle. The reason we do one-to-one first, just to make it the right size. So I will show you here. If you go to crop, just to crop to shape oval, it would just crop it as an actual oval Rama circle in this case. So we'd need to go to Aspect Ratio and do one-to-one as well. The order isn't important as long as both of them are down, if you want to circle. Will go to the last one, go to crop, aspect ratio One-to-one. Back to crop, and then choose oval. Excellent. Here we go. Three perfect circles with images in, looked really good. So from PowerPoint you can crop to any shape you like. Here we just use circles. You click on this, go to picture format, crop. And you can see under cropped shape, you can use any single shape that's in the PowerPoint library. So in here, we could just say, you want this to be times. Click on less cropped shape. Click on this curved shape. And we go. It's very, very easy to better crop it to any shape from the shapes, you can also use the handles that are empowered by for the shapes to make small adjustments. And it's good to know that it's not destructive. And at any point, you can just click on them. And click picture format, crop, crop shape, and just add it back to anything else without affecting the image.
9. EXERCISE 01: Add a photo to this slide: Ok, here's an example that you can do. Got two nice brightly colored images here in the first two balls. And then there's a space on the side for the third one that you can try it out. See if you can make it a perfect circle. And in the correct position, the same as the other two.
10. EXERCISE 01: Result: Ok. How did you do? I'm going to show you how I would have done this. There are a couple of ways of doing it, but this is probably the easiest one. So go to insert, picture, this device. Just choose the image. Then we'll go to crop, aspect ratio 1:1 to make it a square to start with. It mean when we make it an oval, it will make the right circle. Crop to shape, oval. I'm also going to do crop and then just bring in the crop corners very slightly. So the scaling is similar. I do this by holding shift so it doesn't stretch it. I think that looks pretty good. Click off it. Drag it roughly into the right position. To make it exactly the same size, a good way of doing it is by right-clicking on this, choosing format picture and going to height and width and reading what that says, just click on this. And then we can type 8.64 and making sure that lock aspect ratio is on to keep a perfect circle. Here we go. So I'll click on both of these. I can go to arrange, align, align bottom. And I'm going to drag it out roughly by holding shift, keep it in that position. Excellent. If we want to have text underneath it, we can CTRL C, CTRL V to copy that text. Drag it up. You see the guide show it's in line and you can type in your own text. Great. Hope you did OK with this.
11. Cropping images to a custom shape: So I'm not going to show you how you can crop to any shape, as images in PowerPoint don't have to be rectangular. Just insert three images here to give us something to work with. I'm just going to scale them down a bit to make them a bit more manageable. Going to pick the first one here, go to the Crop tool. And under here it says crop to shape and aspect ratio. So in this case we want to make three circles. So I'm going to go to aspect ratio, 1:1, which make a perfect square. I'm going to go back to the crop tool and choose crop to shape oval. There we go. A perfect circle. The reason we do one-to-one first, is just to make it the right size. So I will show you here, if you go to crop, just to crop the shape oval, it would just crop it as an actual oval rather than a circle in this case. So we'd need to go to aspect ratio and do 1:1 as well. The order isn't important as long as both of them are done if you want to circle. We'll go to the last one, go to crop, aspect ratio, 1:1. Back to crop, and then choose oval. Excellent. Here we go. Three perfect circles with images in, that look really good. So from PowerPoint you can crop to any shape you like. Here we've just used circles. You click on this, go to picture format, crop, and you can see under crop to shape, you can use any single shape that's in the PowerPoint library. So in here, we could just say, we want this to be times. Click on this, crop to shape, minus. Click on this, crop to shape, plus. And there you go., It's very very easy to crop it to any shape. From these shapes you can also use the handles that are in PowerPoint for the shapes to make small adjustments. And it's good to know that it's not destructive. And at any point, you can just click on them, and click picture format, crop, crop shape, and just turn it back or turn it to anything else without affecting the image.
12. Not stretching an image: It's important that you don't stretch up an image considerably bigger than its original size. Ideally, always size down without squashing or stretching the image using the corner handles. I'll show you an example of I here. Just go to insert pictures as before. Pick a very small image. You can see that if I scale this image up here, the quality of it is very low. You can see jagged edges here and very large blurred pixels. If I right-click on this image and go to Format Picture. Choose the size here, you can see that I've scaled it to 350% of its original size. And that's why it looks so bad. So we'll just delete that, and go to insert picture, and I'll put in a high resolution version that I've got. And there we go. Go to the format picture size here, you can see that I haven't scaled it so it's still at 100%. You can scale it down by pressing the corners. That's no problem at all. But try not to squash it or to stretch it using the side handles as that will always make it look slightly worse than the original. We're going to show you the two images next to each other on slides here so you can see the difference. Just going into slide-show mode, to show you the best. with the images as big as possible. So here's the image that was stretched to 300% plus, you can see how low quality that looks. Just flick on to the next slide. There's the high-quality one with how it should look. High resolution and looks great.
13. Using picture styles: PowerPoint contains a selection of preset picture styles that you can apply to your photo. Any of these can look bad as they can have too much of an effect. But they can be useful as a quick way to get to a certain style. We click on the image here, go to picture format. You'll see all the styles available here. For example, in this case, we can pick something like rotated whites, which looks pretty good to start with. We can also go home here, click the Format Painter and apply it to our other image for some consistency, to have two images using the picture styles that look pretty good. You can also make adjustments to these styles. So if we click on this image and go to the picture format, and for example, we could change the border here to a slightly different color. If you right-click on these and choose Format Picture, you can then adjust the settings that have been applied to the preset. For example, you can make the shadow a bit heavier or a bit lighter. You can tweak any of these settings, from any of the picture styles. And again, if you're happy with it, you can click the Format Painter and apply it to your other image so they both look the same. One thing that I would generally avoid is going to the picture format and just picking with things at random that aren't consistent. So for example, There's two completely different styles and they don't look good together. If you want to reset your picture back to the original, start again, or pick any new style, you can simply click on it, go to picture format, then go to the reset picture option here. Click on the other one, reset picture.
14. Stylizing images with artistic effects: You can add Artistic Effects to any image Click on the image here and go to picture format. You can see artistic effects up here. There is a selection of the artistic effects that you can choose and you can see a preview of each one. In this example, we're going to choose pencil grayscale. There we go. If you right-click on this image and choose format picture, you can see in the artistic effects in this drop down here, we have two parameters that you can change. For each artistic effect there'll be two parameters. So for example, in this one, we could change the pencil size to 1. And you'll see what that looks like. Or a very large pencil size, which we change to something like 50 and see what that looks like. So for this example, I would probably put the transparency on 20, which allows some of the original image to show you through. To give it a slightly nicer effect. And then I'd probably put the pencil size on something like 10, for a sketch effect. And we'll click on the orange and we'll add the same thing. So go onto pencil greyscale, Go onto transparency, select 20, to allow some of the original image to show through. And 10 for pencil size. Finally, on the last image. There we go. We can see that the style is quite strong for many of these artistic effects. They can work in certain presentations if you're consistent with the design. One thing to note with artistic effects is you cannot use the Format Painter to copy the effect between images. You'll have to click on each one, go to picture format, apply the artistic effect, and then change the parameter as required. So I'm going to show you some examples using autistic effects where they can look really good, depending on the source image. We click here, go to picture format, artistic effects, and you'll see a preview of how each effect is going to look. We're going to go for the bottom left one. If you roll over it, it'll actually show you a little tooltip saying what it's called: cut-out. And you can see it's quite a nice visual effect, there. We go on to the next one. We can apply the same thing. Go to picture format, artistic effects. Rollover cut out. There we go. Looks good. On these pictures here. I think something like a pencil sketch could be a good effect. Note that you can only select one at a time to apply an effect. And then the third one in here is pencil sketch. If you right-click on these and choose format picture, you can see that you get the two parameters that you can change. And I think this looks better with a bit of transparency. So a bit of the image comes through. I'll put it on 20, and I'll take the pencil size down to 10. There we go. That looks good. Now we're just going to apply it to the other ones. Now, when you go home and go to Format Painter and click to apply, it doesn't work with artistic effects, so each effect has to be applied individually. For our final example, we're going to use a glow diffuse. So we'll click on the image here. These look quite good on landscapes. They can work well to add quite a lot of stylization to it. Go to picture format, artistic effects, glow diffuse is here. There we go. This work quite well because this section is made quite white so the text is high contrast.
15. Picture effects that are worth using: PowerPoint has some good effects that you can easily add to your pictures. For example, drop shadows or reflections. Here we will select the image on the left. Go to shape effects, shadow, and then choose one of these shadows, such as the offset bottom right, which the first one. In the format picture box here you'll see that you can adjust the parameters of the shadow. So for example, I think normally a subtle shadow looks best and gives it depth. Select 75 there. Select 10 on the blur and 10 on the distance. And there you go. That's a nice shadow that gives it some subtle depth. But looks more interesting, however, its not too much. Of course, you should also remember that you can click on the image, choose Format Painter, click on the next image, and that'll apply the same effect to both images, which looks good and is consistent for the slide design. For the next example, I'm going to add a reflection. So I'll just reset the pictures here to get rid of the previous drop shadow. I'll go to picture format, picture effects, reflection, and choose first one which is a tight touching reflection, which looks pretty good already. But remember, you can always go into the effects in the format picture and adjust some of the parameters. If you want that a bit of a softer effect, select 85, and we get a more subtle effect. One thing to mention is not to overdo the shape effects. So if we select both of these here, and then for example, go to bevel, or go to shape effects and add a large glow. Go to shape effects again, add a drop shadow. Then we'll go to shape effects again and add a reflection. You can see I've added slightly too much there, there's too much going on. It's too difficult to see what's happening, and it doesn't add to the actual quality of the images. In fact, it takes away from them, so subtly is key here.
16. EXERCISE 02: Add a photo to this chart: Here's another exercise you can try. You can pick any image you like and put it into the tree structure here in the same format.
17. EXERCISE 02: Result: How did you get on? Here's how I would have done it. But as before, there are a couple of ways that it can be done, so whatever suits you is best. I just go to insert picture, this device, take the image I need. I'm going to resize it down to roughly where I want just to see what I'm doing. And I go to crop, aspect ratio 1:1, crop to shape and choose oval, then back crop just to select the scaling and positioning. So I'm going to hold down, shift scale it down a little bit so it's similar to the others in what it includes. Then I'm going to drag the image inside the crop to get it into the right place. Excellent. Click off it. And if I right-click on this and choose format picture, we can see the size, which is 2.73 cm. So I'm just going to click on this and type in 2.73, making sure that lock aspect ratio is selected so it doesn't stretch it. Then as the the final thing, we can go into this click Format Painter and apply it to this. So it has the same border and shadow. And finally, click arrange, align, bottom. Just drag it into position. If we want the text to go there, we can click on this, drag that into position, and then put the correct text in there. Great.
18. Using transparent images: We're now going to have a look at using images with transparency. These can be used in interesting and impactful ways on most designs. So the image formats that can contain transparency, GIF and PNG. Go to Insert, go to Pictures, and I'll just pick up three images that I have, that are PNG files that are transparent. Add them in. Just going to resize these down so they're all a similar size. And using the corner handle so I don't stretch them. Now I'm going to go to some previous content that I've grabbed to show you how quickly, send the background to the back, we can create something that looks great using transparent images.
19. Removing the background from an image: If you have an image that you would like to use, the isn't transparent, you can do this in PowerPoint. So if you click on the image, go to picture format, go to color, and choose set transparent color. This one will work well because it's white on grey, so it's quite a similar color. We'll just click the white. There we go, transparent. If you have an image like this and you want to use it transparent in your PowerPoint, you can't use set transparent color because there isn't a single color. There's quite a lot of colors in here on the background, that's quite complex. So in this case, you'd click on the image, go to picture format and then click remove background. PowerPoint will do it's best to try and remove all the elements of the background that you want, and it will show you the ones it's going to remove in this purple color. And up the top here we have mark areas to keep and mark areas to remove. So there's a little bit more we want to remove and it only has to be rough because the AI sorts out the rest of it. So we'll click on it here, we'll draw in this pen very roughly around the areas we want to remove. Hopefully, PowerPoint will do quite a good job at selecting those. There we go. There's just this little bit here as well. So we'll draw around that because we also want to remove that. Excellent, that looks good to me. So if you do keep changes, so the only bit that's missing there is the stalk in the middle of the apple, but fortunately, PowerPoint has edited it and it's completely non-destructive, which means we can go back to picture format, back to remove background, and then we can actually select mark areas to keep and just draw over the stalk. Hopefully then PowerPoint will know which bit we want to keep, and then it will look great. Click keep changes, brilliant So we've basically just removed complicated background with a non-destructive editing in PowerPoint that looks really good.
20. Changing the colour in images: You can adjust the color of any photo directly in PowerPoint. Here we have two images and your attention is normally drawn to the one on the left because it's quite a lot of color and warmth and contrast in that. So for example, here we can right-click on the image, choose format picture, go into the picture corrections and picture color, and then we're going to take down the contrast by little bit, about 25%. I think take down the saturation to about 50%. They've got two images that though they're not exactly the same color profile, they are more suitable and your attention is balanced between both. So you can adjust the color of any image in PowerPoint. And you can do that either to make it consistent with other images on the page when they have different color profiles, or you can use it as a stylistic effect. Another good option is to change the images to black and white, and this means that have many images you have on screen and whatever colors they have in them, they'll always look consistent. So we'll click on the image, go to picture color, and go to the saturation, change that to 0. That will make the image black and white, There we go. So you can have any amount of images on the screen, and they'll generally always look good together if they're all black and white. Another good option for changing the color of photos in PowerPoint comes from the re-color drop-down. So if we click on an image and click this drop-down, we can see it allows us to have three variations based on certain colors. And these colors are from the theme colors in PowerPoint. So for example, we could click on this image, click the drop-down. Decide we would really like it, Orange accent color 2 dark, there you go. You can use the Format Painter in this case, to apply it to other images so that you can have a consistent style by using the recolor option.
21. Removing unwanted image styles: It's good to know that whatever styles you add to an image and however you resize the image and however you recolor the image, you can always reset it back to its previous state. This is great, so it's completely non-destructive. So here we have an image where we've added far too many effects and some 3D distortion. We will click on picture format, and all you have to do is go to reset picture to remove all the styles. There we go. And if you click on it, you can actually get to a drop-down that allows you to even reset the size. So for example, if we squished it like this. and you see the picture, you can always go to reset picture and size. You'll put it right back to its full size. From there, you can just resize it and place it back on the canvas where you need to.
22. Using images as a shape fill: Pictures can be used to fill shapes. So in this example we can right-click, choose format shape. Go to the fill option, and this time choose picture. Just going to insert from a file that I've got before. There we go. That's great. I've got one more example here. Just right-click again. Format picture, go to picture or texture fill. This time we're going to choose a different one, press insert from a file. There we go. Looks great. You can also adjust the offset of this picture, which is its positioning, or its rotation if needed. Some images can be used to fill shapes, as textures. We've got an image here. It can be any size, but it will have to loop, as you can see if I just make a copy of this, it will loop seamlessly so you can see it work as a texture. So we'll just click on this rectangle on the background. Go to picture or texture fill, we'll hit insert source, and we'll choose the texture. And the important thing to tick is tile picture as texture. And there we go, makes a pattern. From there, you can adjust things like transparency to knock it back a bit more, or make it a bit more vivid as you need. You can use this with any looping texture. You can also increase the scale. Here, if I just take it out to about 25%, you can see how our enlarges the pattern.
23. Part 2 - Choosing Images - Introduction: It's important to choose the right images for your presentation. Consumers have a huge amount of high-quality images trying to catch their attention from websites and social media to printed materials. This means your presentation images needs to look great and they need to be right for your company or brand. In this section, we will cover where to find images both within PowerPoint and online. We'll look at the various factors to consider when choosing suitable images. Making sure the quality is good enough, finding the right image and the importance of consistency in your choices.
24. Where to find images: If you have any high-quality, great looking images that you've taken, or a high-quality resource of images at the company you work for, then using these as the best option where possible. They will help make your presentation unique. If you don't have original images or looking for something specific or generally aspirational, then you can use stock photo libraries. Sites such as iStock and Alamy have an extensive collection of top quality photos that can be used for a fee. There are great sites such as Unsplash, Pexels or Pixabay, where you can search and download any image that you like for free. If you wish, you can support the sites by donating directly to the photographers. These are great resources for aspirational photography. As part of Microsoft 365, the current version of PowerPoint includes stock images that you can access from insert, pictures, stock images. You can also search for exactly what you're looking for. These contain a great selection of high-quality photographs that you can use in any presentation. Completely royalty free. PowerPoint also includes an online image search via bing, the Microsoft search engine. So if you go to insert pictures, online pictures bing will provide you with the results from any search you make. The quality of these can be quite mixed because it's just coming off a random search of the internet. However, it will apply the Creative Commons tag by default, which means that all the images that you select can be used in your presentation, without any worry about licensing. While in the online picture search, if you click the three dots that are on any image, you can see how big the image is. This is presented to you in pixels below. So that's 2716 by 1810. Generally, anything over a couple of thousand pixels is big enough and it looks great. You can also use a Google image search. And if you select tools, you can then go to usage rights and select label for reuse. In most cases, these images will be usable in your presentation. However, as before, they are quite a random selection from around the internet, so some of them may not be great quality. Generally, you would firstly use original, high-quality or branded images if you have them, then you would use free or paid photo library images if you don't have the first. And then you might do an internet search. So you start from the top and work down. But this isn't a hard and fast rule. As long as the photo looks great and you have the freedom to use it, go ahead.
25. Visual appeal: When choosing images we should take into account many factors such as visual appeal, quality, suitability, and emotion. we should choose photos that tell a logical story on their own, or are related by aesthetic qualities. It's important to focus on simplicity and clarity to give your audience the best chance to absorb your message. Here is an example where the three images aren't ideal, they are quite busy and don't focus on clarity. The images are all from Brazil, but you can't easily see this. So the story isn't told effectively through the imagery. Here are three images that do look good. Each has simple, focused on the subject and visually pleasing.
26. Image quality: The quality of the photos you put on the screen indicates the quality of your information. So it's important to find the best quality images you can. These problems can't be fixed in PowerPoint or any image editor such as Photoshop. So there are a few things to definitely avoid, which are photos that are out of focus, overexposed, overly compressed, or pixellated. As you can see here, this image is out of focus. You should always use an image that has the subject of the image in focus. The background can be blurred if that suits the photo, such as in portraits or close-up shots. If the photo is overexposed, you will lose details and the brightest part of the image as they become white. Image compression is used to reduce the size of the graphics file for some images such as jpegs, it can help make large file sizes small, they have too much compression is used, the quality of the image will be reduced to much as you can see here. Pixelation or blur can be shown when you stretch up a low-quality small image, as there is not enough data in the image to show sharp lines and smooth curves. You can stretch up an image a little in PowerPoint and it will still look okay, but the more it's stretched, the worse it will look. Here is an example of a pixelated image. And it should look like this.
27. Choosing suitable images: If you're making a presentation for a company, then it's important to make sure that all of the images you use convey the brand and ethos. For example, if you're designing a presentation about renewable energy than using earthy colors and beautiful scenic photos of landscapes, sky, and water is a great way to present the brand. You can search for images by color tones in most photo libraries, which will help you find similarly colored images. For example, here we'll just search for people. We'll go to any color, drop down and we'll select red. This can be really helpful when you want a theme of similarly colored images for your PowerPoint presentation. Here are a few more examples showing suitable imagery. The presentation about juice or food products could include fresh and striking images. Makeup or skin care products could include vivid and bold colors. Travel slides could feature aspirational landscapes and earthy or sunlit tones. And if you are going for a clean tech deck, you could aim for a light or muted tone.
28. Images provoke emotion: How does this image make you feel when you first see it? How about this? For me, the first image is dark, ominous, foreboding, stormy or scary. Second image, bright, happy sunshine, fresh. Whatever emotion you want to convey, you can use a suitable image. We can see that photos evoke emotions much more powerfully than most words. Here are some examples.
29. Consistency is key: When using photos together in a presentation, it will look great if you choose photos that compliment each other to create a consistent and engaging story, as creating consistency is key. Here is an example where each of the seasonal images has its own color, but they all show trees and leaves at different stages of the season. If you have some black and white images that you would like to use, you can make all of your photos black and white for consistency. You can easily do this in PowerPoint if the photo isn't black and white to start with, you could choose a number of images that have been taken against a white background or close ups of products. Ideally, you should choose photos that are aesthetically similar where possible.
30. EXERCISE 03: Choose four images: Now let's try a quick exercise. Choose 4 photos for a new coffee business presentation that are consistent and visually effective. If you are looking for some high-quality free images to use, then as mentioned at the start, you can look at Unsplash or Pexels.com.
31. EXERCISE 03: Result: Ok, how did you do? Here's a few that I've picked out that look pretty good. And here's how they can be used in a presentation.
32. Avoid clichés: A lot of business presentations include cliched graphics and photos, which are best avoided. They do not distinguish the presentation and can make the presentation look generic. For example, we've all seen things that look like this. Ideally, you should use unique photos if they are suitable and high-quality. As mentioned in the exercise, you can look at sites such as Unsplash and Pexels for free, high-quality images. Powerpoint also now includes stock images for you to use free of charge.
33. Portrait and landscape images: If you are looking for full screen photos, you would usually look for landscape images as they can be easily cropped without losing detail on the 16:9 screen. Here are a couple of examples. Portrait photos can look good on either side of the screen with text or other content on the opposite side. You can filter your search for portrait or landscape in Unsplash and Pexels and most other library sites.
34. Space to overlay content: If you find a suitable photo that has enough white space that is light or dark enough to write text on, it will allow you to create a bot title without having to fade the image out. You can also use areas in the image to overlay key figures or messages.
35. Part 3 - Tips and Tricks - Introduction: With a few tips and tricks, you can greatly reduce the time it takes to create your slides while increasing the quality. Some of PowerPoint's most powerful features are not easy to find, but can boost your workflow and save you a lot of time. We will show you how to use Format Painter on images, the eye dropper tool, and the best animations and transitions to use to enhance your presentation.
36. The format painter: The Format Painter is a very powerful tool which really saves time and speeds up your workflow. It selects the format properties from one object and applies them to another. You can double-click to apply the format repeatedly to many objects, which can be used not just with images, but with shapes, charts, and text as well. This image has a lot of formatting. A border with the gradient crop to a circular shape and the perspective shadow. In this example, we have two other images, and if we want to use the Format Painter, we click first on the thing we want to take the format from, click the Format Painter, and click on the thing we want to apply it to. You can see it's applied all three things perfectly. You can also click the Format Painter again and apply it to the third. If I just press CTRL Z to undo those two for a minute, you can also double-click the Format Painter then click and click again to apply it to multiple items. So when using the Format Painter you'll notice that it carries across the border, the shadow and the shape, but not the size and position. So you can use the Format Painter to apply the border, the shadow, the shape, or any other special effects that you've added, and then the size can be adjusted manually with the parameters in the size panel. In this example, we have two differently sized images. So if we wanted to apply the formatting, you'd click as we did before, double-click the Format Painter, then click on each image to set the border and the shadow. But in this case the size is different. So we can use what we've used before with the crop tool. We'll click on this one, we'll go to picture format, crop, we'll make the aspect ratio 1:1. Click off. Perfect. And we'll go to this one. Picture format, crop, aspect ratio, 1:1. Now, the image in the middle is a slightly different size to the other two, but it is round. So to make it exactly the same size, we can right-click on the one that we want to choose the size from, go to size and position. We see that is 7.86 cm. Make this 7.86 cm as well. We'll make this 7.86 cm as well. There we go. They are now all exactly the right size. So we can click on them, and we can go to arrange, align middle and arrange, align, distribute horizontally. There we go, three images that are the same size with the same formatting using the Format Painter and the crop tool.
37. Compressing images: If you use a lot of images in your presentation and they are very high resolution, you may find that your PowerPoint file is quite big. If needed, you can easily compress all of the images you've used by using the image compression option in PowerPoint. If you are presenting on a big screen at a conference or a large meeting room, I would generally go with the highest quality images possible. However, if you are emailing the file or playing back on a small screen for Zoom or Skype call, for example, then compressing the images may be a good idea. There are a number of different ways of compressing images in PowerPoint, and I will show you a few of these now. In this example deck I only have five images, but they are all quite high resolution and the file size is already 10MB. To compress pictures in this deck, I can click on this image, picture format on the ribbon and then choose compress pictures. And this will give you a number of options. If I only want to compress this single picture, I can tick here, otherwise it would do every single image in the deck. And if I want to delete cropped areas of the picture, I can tick this. And this will mean that if you've cropped a lot of the images, that would just save disk space by removing all the parts of the images that aren't visible. Underneath that will be the resolution, which will be the quality which you compress the images at. High-fidelity, we absolutely full quality, and the lower you go all the way down to email, the smaller the file size will be, and the lower the quality will be. In this example, we will choose Web 150 PPI, press OK. And when we save that, it's only going to be a couple of MB big compared to the 10 that it was originally. You can also choose to compress the images in the save options. So if we go file, save as, more options, underneath the tools drop-down here is compressed pictures. And these will be the same options that you saw previously, but it will allow you to select at any time when you save. It's important to note that you can't uncompress the photos later. So I'd recommend that you turn off this option to delete cropped areas of pictures and you save it either high fidelity, or use default resolution if that is high fidelity, and then save a separate version in a lower-quality format if needed. I would also recommend that the default in PowerPoint options is set to high fidelity, which is the highest quality option. So if we close this box here and go to options and go to advanced, and here it will say default resolution. This means that any file that saved without changing the options will be high-fidelity. The highest quality you can get.
38. Replacing images: The Change Picture option can be a great way to replace one image with another. Especially if you have animation or other format settings applied to it, as it will save you time. Here we have three animated groups. So if we wanted to change the picture, we can left-click to select, left-click to select the image inside the group, right-click, and then choose Change Picture. And I'm going to change it with this one. Great. Now, if we want to change it with an image that is actually a different size, that one happened to be the square one, I'll pick one here. We can see that now that doesn't work. So what we do is we can right-click, first of all we'll adjust the crop window, so be careful which handles you're dragging here. These ones will be the black rectangles, that's the crop window. And it will snap to the size. Now we just have to scale up the image inside the crop window, which is these white circles inside. Now I'll hold down shift as well. And that's about right so I can just click on the middle, drag it into position. Click off. Now when I hit play, all my settings will be preserved. The animation will look great.
39. Using animated GIFs: Animated GIFs are a format of image that contain animation. Perhaps you have some on your company website and these can also be used in PowerPoint. There are lots of online libraries, but most are quite light-hearted and not suitable for use in a presentation. That they can be a good way to display animations or effects that would be difficult or impossible to create using PowerPoint animation. For my first example, I'm going to show you how you can use an animated GIF as a background. So here I've got a title in a circle. I'll click on the background, right-click and choose format background. Then I'll go to picture, insert from a file and choose the pattern I've downloaded earlier. And then important to tick is tile picture as texture for this. And then we'll play. For a second example, rather than having a simple bulleted list like this, we could separate the text like this, and then we'll go and insert an animated GIF. Go to insert pictures, this device, and I'm just going to pick some animated, the colored lines in a circle. Put them where I want to put them and send them to the back. Now I can hold down CTRL Shift and drag to copy them. Send this one to the back, do the same again. Send this one to the back. Then when I play this, you have three animated circles. You can also animate them into your slide, like this. A good way of using animated GIFs.
40. Making animated GIFs: It's also possible to make animated gifs in PowerPoint. First, you need to set the pixel dimensions of the image you want to produce. So for this, we'll go to Design slide size, custom slide size. And here we can type in the pixel dimensions we want. So say for example, type in 1280 px by 720 px, and it was set the size to that. In this example, I've chosen an image of a rocket, and it's a vector image, might have shapes. Now I've added some animations to it that we can see in the animation pane. The key things here are that you can add any effect you like. That looks good. But to make sure that you keep it short, otherwise the Jeff will become very large. So keep it down to a couple of seconds. And then the J4 loop and look good if the ether used on a website or in a PowerPoint file. So here I've added a number of different animations to different parts of the rocket. I've added a spin that these shapes here and appear to these. The wipe down on this and this and this, and then on the flame, I've added a post. And the important thing to do with this is to make sure they all happen at the same time. So they all start with previous or possibly with a slight delay as needed, just on these two. So when I play it, that's what we'll loop. And then I go to File Export, create an animated GIF, create Jeff. And now I'm going to type in your kit. And I will not go to File new blank layout to blank. Just going to insert picture from this device. And I'm going to insert rocket. So I've just created, is now an animated GIF. You can put this on a webpage, descended 21. You've created an animated GIF from PowerPoint.
41. The selection pane: When you have objects or images that are on top of each other, the selection pane can be a very handy tool. You can use it to change the z position of each object, which is the order of the images from front-to-back and easily show and hide layers while you make any adjustments you need to the images. Here I have three images that are on top of each other, which can be useful if, for example, you're fading all these images on and you want them to be in the same place. Now, if we wanted to change the order that they appear in, is can be a bit tricky because when you right-click on them, you can keep sending them to back, but it is a bit difficult to know the exact order. So in this case, we could go home and then we could either go to arrange, selection pane or select, selection pane. There are the three photos. So if I just quickly drag them out the way you will see that they are behind them. I'll just undo those. Now I've renamed these already and just by clicking on them once, you can type in anything you like. And this helps reference to your photos so you know which ones are which. At the top of the list is the image that's at the front, and at the bottom of the list is the image that's at the back. When you click on these little eye icons, there's the first image, there's the image that is on top of it, and there's the one that's right at the front. And if for example we want to have the one in leaves right at the front, I could just pick it up, drag it and drop it to the top here, and it would appear at the front. Now for example, I can select all of these, go to animations, fade and on click, and they would all appear in this order. I'll just play that. There we go. So that's body, face and then in leaves. And if we wanted them in a slightly different order, just delete the animation, then we say we want the face wanted to be at the top, and the body one to be second. Again, I can select them all, go to animations, select fade on click. And now they will play in that order. Leaves, body and face. There we go. So this can be a very useful tool, especially if you have a lot of elements over the top of each other. And it's really good for keeping track of where you are. Note that when you actually click the I to hide any layer, it will stay hidden until you click the eye, to get it back.
42. The eyedropper tool: The eye dropper tool is used to choose colors from other objects so colors can match. You can use it to quickly use colors from images such as logos or photos. It was introduced in PowerPoint 2016. Before that, you would have either had to enter RGB values for each bespoke color, or choose them from this color palette box. But now having this eyedropper tool makes everything much quicker. In this first example, I'm going to make the fourth box the same color as the other three. I click on it, then I go to shape fill, eyedropper, click on this color. It's as simple as that. We can also take colors from outside of PowerPoint. Here we have an image from Unsplash in a browser. Just going to click on the items I want, then I'm going to go to the eyedropper tool. I'm going to click inside and hold the mouse down, now when I drag it across to the browser, it picks the color of I'm rolling over. So for example, I could have this light green background here. And then for the text, I'll do the same thing. Eye dropper, click on it and move over. And then for example here I could have the dark green is the text. In this next example, you can see how we can take the color from a logo. We will click on the thing we want to change. Go to shape fill, eyedropper, and you can see whichever logo you rollover, you'll get that color. For my final example, I'm going to show you how you can change the colors of a pie chart using the colors of a photo. So we'll click on the pie chart and we'll click again on this segment. Go to eyedropper, and we'll choose this color here. Click on the orange segment, click on this purple color here. And we'll choose probably a blue. And then we'll choose a dark color for the last bit. So you can use photos to create really nice color themes directly inside PowerPoint using the eyedropper tool. Any photos you have that you like the look of, just bring them in and use the eyedropper tool to change any object you have to that color.
43. Animating images: You can make your slides containing images more dynamic and engaging with the use of subtle animation. PowerPoint contains many default animations that are over the top and don't add much to the presentation experience. But with some good choices and a few tweaks, you can make the presentation come alive. Here are a couple of examples. In this case, I'm going to make an animation where the text that comes up line by line and then the image slides in from the right. So first for the text line by line, I'll select this. I'll go to animations and I'll choose fade. Then I'll click on the animation pane and choose after previous for all of these. I also want to make them a bit quicker, so I'll just take the duration down to a quarter of a second. That's perfect. Now I'm just going to fade on the last one as well in the same way. So I'll go to start, choose after previous. Now, when I play this, that'll come on line by line. And for the image, we want it to slide in from the right-hand side. I will click on it. I can choose fly-in. The default is up. So then you can click on the effect options here and choose from right. The only other thing I want to do with this is slow it down a little bit, put it on 1 second. And if you double-click on this, which is the picture, you can choose the smoothness of the end, which is like easing, which makes it start quicker and finish slower. Provides a nice effect. And finally, the default was on click here, I'm just going to choose after previous. But now when you play this, it will all happen in the correct order at a nice speed. Generally, you'll be wanting the animation to finish in a second or two after you enter the slide. In this example, I chose the image to slide in from the right. And I did that because that's the side that's over already and it wouldn't have been distracting by coming in over the text. Can show you what that might look like here. If we play back the slide now, after choosing from left and see that it's distracting as it goes over the text. Another thing to mention is not to choose effects that are too distracting in general. So for example, something like the bounce option, which is here, is too much going on at once. Effects such as fade, fly in, float in, wipe, and zoom can be used on most images. And they all look good. Here is an example where the images is on the left. So in this case it would actually be quite good to fly in from the left. Click on it, choose fly in. Again, the default is up. You can click on effect options, choose the direction, and then as before, I slowed this down a little bit, put it on to after previous, so it starts after the box in the middle fades up with the text in. And then if you double-click, you can choose the smooth end again. Giving that effect which looks quite good.
44. Slide transitions: Transitions between slides with images normally look best using either none or a short fade. However, you can creatively use push and a few other options to add some enhancing movement to some slides. Here is an example of a basic fade transition. So I'll just go Page Down to go to the slide that I've got full-screen image and go to transitions and choose fade. And the default time of 0.7 seconds is normally pretty good for fading between images. Page down to the next slide. Apply fade to that, you can see it previewing as we do it. I'll put a fade on the third slide there. Now I'll just go back to the beginning. Press play and you can see it fade. You click between the slides and that looks really good for nearly all images. You can use a push transition to create a carousel effect with these full height images I have here. Just go onto the slide, choose transitions, and then we'll choose push. Then in this case, I'm going to choose from right, from the effect options. And I'm going to go down to the next slide and apply the same push again from right. Then I'm going to go onto the next slide. Use push, and again from right in the effect options. Now I'm going to get back to the first slide, view the slideshow. And you can see as you move between slides, it creates a carousel effect. You can also go back a slide, and it will smoothly move between the images. There are some transitions in PowerPoint that you generally want to avoid in most presentations. I'll give you some examples here. We'll just click on the slide and we go to transitions. For example, in this one click we'll click on origamy. You can see that's quite a distracting visual to have in the middle of a presentation. Are the ones that I wouldn't use, things like crush and fracture. These can be quite distracting and they can make the presentation look quite amateur. Generally, anything in the exciting section is normally best avoided in most cases. A few of the options here, such as gallery and cube, can be used in some instances if it suits the content. You can also use a morph transition to create interest and tell a story with any images. From transitions, there is this morph option here, and that's available in the current version of PowerPoint. Here, I've set up a morph between this slide, this slide, and this slide. By selecting morph in the transitions menu. I'll show you how that looks. We go into slideshow. Basically, PowerPoint will automatically work out how to animate the objects between the slides depending on where they are and when creating more to yourself, I would recommend duplicating the slides and moving the objects to the position you would like them in. So for example, if I took the last slide I had here, I just CTRL D to duplicate it. I can then move these images where I'd like them to go. And the text where I'd like it to go. And then when I play from this slide, I need to make sure that the morph is set in the transitions. And then PowerPoint will automatically recognize where the image is on the following slide and animate between them.
45. 15 photo album: The photo album function is a great time-saver if you want to display many photos. If you go to insert, then go to photo album, you can then do new photo album. Then you go to file, disk. And here I'm just going to select a number of pictures I've got that I want put into the presentation and press insert. And this will display every photo in this list I've just selected. And from here you have a number of options. In the picture layout, you can choose different layouts that are available. There are a number of presets here, for example, I can just pick one per slide. And this rather small preview here will show you a representation of where it would be on the slide. And the frame shape, for example, I could just put a simple white frame on these. These selection boxes here will allow you to click on any of the photos and press the tick box and then you can move them up or down or remove them. And when you press create, we'll wait a few seconds, and a presentation will be created with all of these 13 items placed on different slides and in the right place and at the right size. So that's a really quick way of getting in a lot of images without having to resize them or reformat them. And you have a number of other options that you can do under here. So if you go to insert photo album, you can now edit the photo album. And from here, you can choose things like two pictures in a simple frame or just no fram at all. And I'll update. You can see it's pretty quick and it lays out the pictures perfectly next to each other. You can even go to insert photo album, edit photo album. and add captions below all the pictures, or make them all black and white if you choose. I'll just update that so you can see the captions. And now you can go and edit these. These are just taken the captions from the file name, when you first add them. As you can see, it's a really quick way of getting the pictures resized perfectly and aligned perfectly. And from here, you can select all the slides that you've got with the photos and then you can paste them into a new presentation or an existing presentation. The only thing to bear in mind here is that once you've done this, when you next go to insert photo album, you won't better edit them. Once you've pasted them into an existing presentation or a new presentation, they will lose the edit functionality. So you make sure you get them right, and you're happy with the layout, but now you can pick them up, copy them into any where you'd like or reformat them as you need. The same with the background. So you can obviously go in and just change this background to any color or any picture that you choose.
46. Quick Access Toolbar: One thing you'll notice is
I have this toolbar here, which is the Quick
Access Toolbar. It's very useful to have this because it can speed up
your workflow considerably. I've actually included
a link so you can download my Quick
Access Toolbar and I'll show you how you can add that to your PowerPoint if you don't
have one already, of course. You can right-click on this and hit "Customize the Ribbon". Then you can see the
Quick Access Toolbar is here then you can
go to, "Import", "Import customization file" and then select "My file"
that you've downloaded. This will then show you
the Quick Access Toolbar. One thing to mention is that when you first see
the Quick Access Toolbar, it may be above the
ribbon by default, so here, which isn't ideal because it makes going to access all the options take
a longer time because you have to go above the
ribbon to get to it. Click on this arrow with a
line above it and choose "Show below the ribbon" and then not only does it
look a lot tidier, but everything is a
lot quicker to get to. If there are things that
you don't use very often, then you can just
simply right-click on them and say "Remove from
Quick Access Toolbar". I will also show
you how you can add things easily to the
Quick Access Toolbar. You can right-click on this, and choose more commands, and then go through
this enormous list. Select this as "All commands", you can see there's
hundreds of things in here, and you can then add them by using this button into
your Quick Access toolbar. That can take quite a long
time trying to find them. I'll give you an example
here where I've just add a stock image so I can
show you as we go. If for example, I
wanted to crop this to 16 to 9, which is the screen, I can click "Crop", "Aspect ratio", then I
can go down to 16 to 9. But before we click it, I'm going to right-click on this and then you can see
a little menu pops up with "Add to Quick Access Toolbar". We're
going to do that. You can see it's added a little icon to the
Quick Access Toolbar. Now, whenever I click on that, it's going to crop the image
that I've selected 16 to 9, which is an excellent
way quickly being able to access any function
that might have taken 2, 3, 4, even five clicks to
get to one click away.
47. Part 4 - Advanced Examples - Introduction: In our advanced examples, we will show you advanced ways to use images and wow your audience. These will cover use of 3D, isometric, parallax, zoom, and other animated effects. We will also include a highlighting example where we will show how you sometimes have to creatively use different approaches in PowerPoint to achieve your desired result. Some of these examples can be a little tricky to set up, but as before, all of the files I use are available for you to download and adapt for your presentation.
48. Isometric 3D image effects: You can use 3D rotation, 3D formats and shadow options to create cool-looking visuals with multiple images. Such as this, which is similar to the image I've used at the start of each of my course modules. To recreate this look, we can take a number of images that I've already sized, such as these, we'll click on the image, right-click and choose format picture, then go into the 3D rotation option and choose isometric top up. And we can add a shadow, I'll just take a preset, the first one in this case, change a couple of parameters to how like it, just 75% transparency, 10pt blur and 0 distance. And then I'm going to get back to the 3D rotation where it says distance from ground, I'm just going to put 5. You can see that lifts it of the ground and gives it a good depth. Now we can apply this to the other images, and we can do this in a couple of ways. If you click on the one we've already applied the 3D effect too, and you click Format Painter can then click to apply it to another one. Or of course you can double-click the Format Painter go round each one of them. If we just undo that with CTRL Z, there is a quicker way. We can click on this and press CTRL shift C. Then we can lasso over every single one And press CTRL shift V. Excellent. There is one other way that we could've used, and I'm just going to undo that to show you. We could select all the ones we want to apply it to, group them with Control G. Click on the format we want, click on the Format Painter and then apply it to the group. And all of these ways work. But by grouping and ungrouping, sometimes you can remove parameters that you want, such as animation. There are a number of other options you can apply in the 3D format section, which includes bevelling, depth, contour, materials and lighting. For example, we could go in here and type 15 depth. And that would give us a solid piece like a cuboid. And that can look quite good, especially on images like this, which have solid colors around the edge of the image. And again, you could click Format Painter and apply these. And so for example, if we went in here and chose the first bevel which is round, you can see that puts quite a lot on it, which might be an effect you're going for. If I just make it a little bit more subtle to make it look a bit nicer here. That's quite a nice effect. And then we could apply that to any of them. And then move them apart from each other slightly because now there are a bit bigger. So the 3D section can be a very powerful tool, if you used in the correct way.
49. Highlighting areas: Using a panel: In PowerPoint, there are often different ways of producing your desired outcome. In this highlighting image area example, we will explore a variety of techniques. So in this example, I'm going to use a circle to highlight a few of the areas. I'm going to make it red so we can easily see where they are at the moment. So I'm going to have one area that's here. I'm going to CTRL D to duplicate, one area that's here. Make this a little bit bigger. One area that's down here somewhere. And one area that's over here. Now we can take a full-screen rectangle. I'm going to make this black with no outline. I'm going to size it up to the size of the screen. Right-click to choose send to back. Then right-click on this image and to send to back. Now we've got the black, we're going to shift select, to select the black and the red circles. Now we're going to go to shape format, going to go to merge shapes, we're going to do combine. This will produce cut-outs of the image. Once we've done this, we can go to format shape, we can go to fill, and we can adjust the transparency to suit. That that seems about right, about 40%. And now I've got some text from another slide. I can just paste it in as an example. Just align those. We can see how you can easily highlight areas of an image. So this is just one of a few ways that you can highlight areas of an image. And I'll be showing you the otherwise in the next lesson.
50. Highlighting areas: Using a duplicate image: In this second example, we're going to show you how you can highlight areas of an image using merge, shapes, intersect. And this will give us a few different variations from the previous example, where we can do things like change the color, the background, and the colors of the highlighted areas. So the first thing we're going to do is get the circles from the previous version, to save me drawing these in again. And these are the areas we're going to be highlighting. Then we're going to go to format picture. And what we're goning to do on this one is just take the brightness down by about 50%, so we can use this as a background. And then we're gonna take a copy of the original picture, which is here, and we're going to paste it and position it on top of everything else. And we're going to send it to back. Then we're going to send the black one to back. So what we're going to end up with here is just underneath this image here will be our background, but having this image here will allow us to merge these shapes, the red circles, into the background. So this wil take a couple of steps. The first thing we're going to do is click to select all the circles I'm using shift select here. And then we're going to go to shape format, merge shapes, and union. That will make all of these circles one shape. Now we can select the background first, which is important, and then shift select to select the circles second Once we've done that, we can go to shape format, merge shapes, then we will choose intersect. This is what highlights the areas of the image. Now we can get the labels that I created earlier. I'm just going to copy and paste this onto my slide. And that looks good already. Using this method to highlight areas of an image means you can do things like alter the background because it's separate. So if I go to format picture and then go to picture corrections or picture color, I can actually make alterations. So for example, if I wanted to make it black and white, I could just take all the saturation out and that would make just the background black and white. Now I could also add some color styles to these. for example, remember these were all one item at the moment, so whatever you apply to them will apply to all of them. And I could, for example, go to recolor, and I could choose a color from the color template palette. Then I could also go to something like shape outline. I'm just going to go to shape outline again, and choose white. So you can see by using this method to highlight areas of an image, you can apply different color effects to the highlighted areas, and you can also change the background.
51. Highlighting areas: Using background fill: In this method, we're going to use slide background fill to highlight areas of an image. Using this method gives you some good flexibility with moving the image about and changing the shapes. So the first thing we need to do here is right-click on the background, choose format background, then go to picture or texture fill, the default will be this, and then insert the picture. I'm just going to go and find the picture that we had. There we go. Now, that is a background fill, so you won't be able to move this around. But if you ever want to change it, you can just come back to format background. Now we can create a black rectangle across the whole screen, so I'm just going to draw a small rectangle, just going to fill it in black, give it no outline. I'm going to let it snap up to the corner and fill the whole slide. Now, I'm going to send it to the back, and I'm going to give it some transparency. So about 25% where you can still see it will work well for this example, Now I'm going to put the circles in for the areas we wish to highlight, I'm just going to pick these four I've got previously. And I'm going to right-click on these, format object and go slide background fill. This is the key feature here that will fill them in with the actual part of the background that it's covering. So if any of these are moved, you'll see that it updates with the new section of anything that it's covering. This gives you some good flexibility being able to move the images, for example. Now I can just get my labels that I had earlier. Copy and paste them onto my slide. And there's an example using slide background fill. So the key points here are that you can pick up these images and drop them on different places, or you can duplicate these images and dropped them on different places, and that'll automatically highlight the section where you've left them. The other thing you can do here is you can actually change the shape for example, if you wish. You can go to shape format, edit shape, change shape, and you can pick whatever shape you would like. I think this gives you a really flexible option when highlighting areas of an image.
52. Highlighting areas: Using the crop tool: For this example of highlighting areas of an image, we can use the crop tool and this can be a bit fiddly to setup, but it's a really good option because you can add some really good animation effects that I'm going to show you at the end of this example. So the first thing we'll do in this example create a copy of this image we're going to use in a minute to place over the top. And on the background, I'm going to take out the color and make it darker as before. So I'm going to right-click and choose format picture. I'm going to take the brightness down by about 50. I'm also going to take the saturation down to 0. So create a darker black and white image. Once I have this, I can then position my image across the top to left and top. And now I'm going to send backward. So it's underneath the title. And I'm now going to use the crop tool. If we go to picture format, crop, we're going to in this case, crop it to a shape of a circle. And we're also going to go to crop and choose an aspect ratio of 1:1, which gives us a circle rather than an oval. So what we have here is a cropped version of the background as a circle. And now we can drag these corner handles that are black to anywhere we want to show our highlighted area. And if we want to select another highlighted area, we can just go back to our image, paste it in, line it up in the right place, and again, choose crop to shape, select the oval, and then choose aspect ratio 1:1 to make it a perfect circle. Then I can pick up the handles and drag it somewhere else to select the next thing. Now I've highlighted two areas of the image. Now this approach can be time-consuming, but it does have two advantages. One is that you can select any of the highlighted images. And you can actually apply the same sort of effects like re-coloring individually to them has in one of the previous examples. The other advantage is that you can use the morph transition to correct a nice-looking effect. To do this, we'll be moving the cropped area. So we've got our first slide here and we'll CTRLl D to duplicate it. And on the second slide, I'm going to move this text over to here and say that this is a chartered accountants, for example. Then I'm going to click on this, the highlighted area, I'm going to right-click and choose crop. And then I'm going to move the crop over to this building, which is going to be the Chartered Accountants. One thing that's important to mention here, is to not just a pick it up in the middle, other wise that will move the actual image itself rather than the crop of the image, is to pick it up at the sides or the top where the edge of the crop window is. Now you can see it's just moving where the actual crop is, not the whole image. So if I decide this is the Chartered Accountants, I can drop the image here. Click off it, and now I'll go to transitions and morph. We're going to see that it morphs really nicely between the positions of the two cropped areas. So I'll just play that. So we've had the investment bank that's highlighted on this slide. Then we'll click forward. It'll go really smoothly like a searchlight, like spotlight almost onto the second cropped area, which is a really nice effect. So you can see there are a number of methods of highlighting areas of an image, and they all work certain purposes, and they all have benefits and advantages depending on your requirements.
53. The Ken Burns effect (Pan and Zoom): Ken Burns is an American filmmaker. He used a start of zooming and panning on photos and documentaries. This helped keep interest and movement in motion films and TV programs where it be too still to have a static photograph. We can recreate a similar effect with images in PowerPoint using either the grow/shrink effect, the motion path effect, or both If preferred. So to recreate this example, we'll take this image here. We'll click on it, will go to this drop down that selects more effects. And we'll choose grow/shrink. And they're already, you can see a preview of what it's going to do, what we need to make a few adjustments to make it look good. The first one we'll do is set the duration that's default to 2 seconds, to about 20 seconds. And we'll double-click on this item in the animation pane and set the size that it's going to zoom to. Something smaller, about 130, which is 30%t bigger than it started. We can also set the smooth end and a smooth start, somewhere in the middle. And then the final thing would be to go to start and choose with previous. That means when you play it, it will start automatically with the slide. Now you can see it's a very slow zoom, that looks good. You can also set it to auto reverse if you would like it to zoom out afterwards and then zoom it in, so looping. If we double-click on this, you can see the option auto reverse. Now when I click on that and press OK, the animation will play for 20 seconds, zooming in. And then it will zoom out for 20 seconds and then it will continue. You can also add a motion path if you would like to use a pan effect, for example, panning into an area of interest. So to do that, we'd click on the image. We go to add animation as you're adding an additional animation on top of the grow/shrink. You'd add a motion path line, see the default is down. When we click on this, we want to pick up on the red dot and move it to where we'd like it to go to. So I might want to pan into this building slightly, change the duration to match the grow/shrink time, which is 20 seconds. We also change start to with previous, to make sure it happens at the same time. Now when we play this, it should zoom in and pan slightly at the same time. And if you want to make the effect more subtle, just double-click back into this grow/shrink change it to 115, quite slow. So it's about adjusting the motion path and the Grow Shrink amount to get the effect you're looking for.
54. Animated slide background: You can use a background image to create a cool animated parallax style effect. And this is the effect we're going to be recreating. And the great thing about this effect is that once you've created it is very easy to change the image. So we're going to start off with a blank slide. And the first thing we'll do, I've got some shapes that I drew earlier, I'm going to pick up these three circles and paste them into my slide. I've also got a rectangle that is the full size of the screen, going to paste onto my slide. And I'm going to right-click and send to back. These are all the shapes I need for my effect. I'm now going to set the background. For that, I click off the slide, right-click, choose format background. I select the picture, insert, from a file, and pick the image I've chosen. Now, when we select all of these items, we can right-click on them, go to format object and choose slide background fill as the fill. Now we can add the animation effect. Click on the circle in the middle, go to animations, drop-down box, and choose grow/shrink, and see what's about to happen in the preview. So if we click on the animation pane here, we will be able to double-click on this, we'll choose a much smaller size for this effect, something like a 110%. Slow it down a little bit to about 3 seconds. And we'll give it a smooth start and end of about a second. That looks good. And we'll also set it to auto reverse. So it will zoom in and then shrink. And under timing where it says repeat, we will choose until end of slide so it will keep looping. We can now easily copy this effect from this circle to the other circles and the rectangle background using the animation painter, you click on the item that's got the animation on, and double-click the animation painter, and then click once on this circle, once on this circle, and once on the rectangle. Now press ESC to get out of the animation painter options. We now need to go to the animation pane, shift select to select all four of these, and choose to start with previous. Which means that all the effects will happen when you go onto the slide at the same time. Now the only thing to make this effect slightly better and work well that we need to add is a slight delay on each item as it comes on. Probably about half a second. So we'll add half a second delay to item number 2, 1 second delay to item number 3, 1.5 second delay to item number 4. And for the final element, we'll just go and get the text that was on the original. It was this. Copy it from that slide, paste it into my new slide. Make the text white so it's visible. And play. A very cool looking effect, that's quite simple to setup. Once you have made all the shapes and the animation on this, its very easy to change the image. If we just right-click on the background as before, use format background, go to insert picture, from a file, and then we can select a different image. Because this is a background image, all of the elements that you use it will update automatically.
55. Parallax reveal effect: So here is an example where we can create a reveal effect using a background image. And this can create quite a lot of interesting looking effects. So in this example, we've got this. So to create this effect or similar, we'll start with a blank slide. And we'll right-click on the background and choose format background. Then we'll choose picture or texture fill, insert, from a file, and select the file we would like to use. And that effectively formats the background has a picture fill. Firstly, we're going to take the title, animated title reveal effect. I'm going to copy this onto our slide background fill. And we're just going to make the text white so we can see it clearly. So in this example, I've used the shape parallelogram to create an interesting effect as we reveal the image. And this is available in the basic shapes section here. Parallelogram. And then if you click, you just see it draws in. And you can use this small yellow circle to adjust the angle and the width. And rather than draw them all in now, I'll just go to ones I've created earlier which are here. And I've created six of them and put a white outline around them so you can see where they are when we do the next step. So we'll CTRL C from here, go back into our slide, where we've got the slide background fill and CTRL V to paste them in. You can see I've actually added an animation path, which I'll show you how to do in a minute to each one of these. So now they reveal off like this. So the final step in this case would be to right-click on all of them. Choose format object, go to the fill section and make sure it's on slide background fill. And finally, go to no outline. When you play this back now, it will reveal, as I showed you at the start, to get that nice effect. Couple of things I'd like to mention here to make it a bit easier to do this. Firstly, you can see that as you move over each one of them, the cursor will change slightly. If you're not over one of them at all, it'll just be an arrow. If you are over one of them, it will become an arrow with a four pointers, directional pointers above it. When you click on it, you can then pick this up and put anyway like and you can see that wherever you drop it, it will automatically take that part of the background image. And this can be a little confusing because you can't really see exactly what you're dealing with. So for example, I will just unselect the title part. I've selected all of them here and I put a white outline around them just while I was working with them because then I can see exactly where they are. And this helps, for example, when you're putting animation on. And to do the animation, I would just temporarily remove everything but one of them, just so you can clearly see how I do the animation. And you can go to add animation, line. And then you select it to go the direction you'd like. In this case is to the right. What's important here is if you click on the red and then hold down shift and move this red dot, that then becomes a red arrow, to make sure that goes all the way out of the page. So when you run this now, that will then go all the way out of the page. And you can go to the start menu, and you can change this to after previous, so it means it happens automatically. And you can also double-click and change the amount of time you'd like it to have, and if you want it to start smoothly or end smoothly, and the actual duration. So we can set it to a bit slower. Excellent. And when we're happy with the animation, we can click on it. And then change the shape outline back to no outline. And then you can just apply that to multiple shapes to get exactly the same effect we had at the beginning.
56. Filling text with an image: In this example, I'm going to show you how you can use images to add interest and style to large bold text by filling the text with the image. First, we can create some big bold text such as this. Then we can place an image behind it. And in this case, I would recommend using one with lots of contrast but not too much detail. This will show through the text well. So we're just going to paste this into here and send it to back. And now I'm going to shift to select both parts. Then I'm gonna go to shape format merge shapes, and choose intersect. Now this looks pretty good already. But you can also do things like add a shadow, just add a drop shadow here, which adds a bit more depth and makes it look a little bit nicer. It's a really nice effect to use images in text. For a second example of this, I'll show you how to do this on a light background. We've got some big bold text here that says surf. Now going to get a suitable image to put in the background. Just going to paste this into here, send it to the back. Select both. Go to shape format merge shapes, intersect. In this second example, I think the text could do with a bit more contrast against the background. So I'm going to right-click on this, use format picture and then go across to my picture corrections and my picture color settings. I'm going to take off a little bit of brightness, about 20%. I'm going to add a bit of contrast, about 30%. And then I'm going to go into the saturation, put this onto about 250, creating quite a bold image against the background. And finally, if you wanted to use this on a dark background, just paste it into the dark background we had earlier. That looks quite good already, but we could lighten up. So right-click, choose format picture. Go along to the corrections. In this case probably want it on zero, so I'll just hit reset. And that might get a bit brighter to work on the dark background. But we'll keep the saturation as before because they look quite good.
57. Filling text with video: In this example, I can show you how to fill text with a video. So the best thing to do here is to start with a big bold piece of text such as this. Then draw an a shape that covers the whole screen. Just going to make sure that the shape outline, no outline. Shape fill is this blue color. And I'm going to right-click, send to back. Then a shift to select the text and the background. Then I'm going to go to shape format, merge shapes, combine. So now this has combined both the text and the shape and its effectively made a cut out where the text would be. So now we can get the video. We can go to insert, video, videos on my PC. And I'll pick this trees video that I found earlier. Once we have the video, we can hold down shift to resize it to roughly the right size of the text. Doesn't have to be exactly correct. We can right-click on this, choose send to back. And I will just go to playback and make sure that we have start automatically selected and loop until stopped selected. So now when we play back the slide, you have the nice effect of video inside text.
58. Knockout text over video: You can use the shape and subtract option to overlay a text panel with knockout text on either images or video. In this example, I've got some text in the middle. Quite bold text normally works better for this. I'm just going to align a shape behind it. Select both with shift, go to shape format, merge shapes, then subtract. And what that's done is it's cut the shape of the text out of the box. Now this text effect can look good over either video or images. In this example, I'm going to put a video behind it, and we'll go to insert and in the media section, video, video on my PC, and select a video that I've chosen. Now the first thing we need to do is size the video up to the full screen. Right-click on it and choose send to back. Now when I play, this is going to be the video that's behind it. And the only one thing we want to do here is make sure the video starts automatically and we don't have to click. To do that, we can go to playback, start and then choose automatically. Now when you play the slideshow, that will play back automatically. And as I mentioned, this effect works well over video and images. One other thing you might want to do is hide these controls as if it's in the background, you don't really need them. So you can go to slideshow and then show media controls. Take this off. Now when you play back, the video, controls.
59. 3D photo cubes: In this example, I'm going to show you how you can create three-dimensional photo cubes like this. First of all, we will take three photos such as these, and we will crop them all to squares. Then we'll make them the same size. And I will do this a simple way by overlaying them. Just dragging them and they'll snap to the same size. All right, so that's our first step of making three images exactly the same size and ratio. Now, we can apply different 3D rotation for each of the images to make it into the base of a cube. So we'll right-click and choose format picture, we'll go to this option: effects, and then we'll choose 3D rotation from the preset menu, and choose any of these. In this case, we're going to use an isometric. So the first one we'll choose his isometric left down. And we'll click on this one, which is isometric right up. And then we'll click on this one. And we'll choose isometric top up. There are now the three panels you need for your cube, and we'll just drag them all in, bring that by one pixel. Excellent there's your cube. Now if you would like, you can add effects to that. If we click on these and go to 3D format, you'll see there's a top bevel. When you press the drop-down, it will appear with these options, you can use round, in this case, I will just choose a bevel of two. And again, I would now adjust it so it's in the right place. There we go. And so that just adds a nice three-dimensional effect on the edges. So we can take an oval, drag it out to about here. Doesn't matter exactly where it is, is we can adjust it later. We can go to gradient fill, we can choose path under type. We can get rid of these other stops by dragging them off, click on them and drag down. And at the moment that's going from white to blue. You can click on the white bit and change it to black. You can check on the blue bit and change that to black. Now what we want to do is make them transparent to give it a shadow effect. So on the right-hand side, which is the outer of the circle, we will select a 100% transparent. You can see it's starting to look like shadow already. On the left-hand side, select something like 40. Then importantly, we'll turn the outline off. Excellent, there's our shadow. We'll just right-click and send it back. And that looks really good. Once you've created this 3D photo cube, you can also create it from different perspectives using the 3D rotation tool quite easily. First of all, use the lasso tool to select the whole object. You press CTRL D to duplicate it, and drag it into a new position. Now click on a face and right-click and choose format picture. Now if we go into the 3D rotation section, we can just select a different preset. So for example, we could use this one which is the off axis 1. And then we'll select the other face and select off axis 1 left. And the third face, and select select off axis 1 right. And then we'll just drag them down so they're aligned. Just use the keyboard cursor keys to get it exactly in the right position. There you can see you easily have made a different rotation of the 3D cube. I would always recommend that whichever rotation you like, you stick to using the same rotation for all of your imagery on the screen. Otherwise, it's quite confusing from a three-dimensional space to see a lot of things at different rotations on the same slide. I would also recommend when you're using 3D rotation for effects similar such as this, you stick to using the presets that are in the parallel section, of which you have isometric, off-axis 1 and off-axis 2. And this will make it a lot simpler to put the cubes together as the x rotation, y rotation and z rotation will be put in for you. And here is an example of how we can use the cubes in a nicely designed slide. I've taken the cube that we created earlier with duplicated it into three places. Then I've added a small bit of animation. Just play that now. Excellent.
60. Table with photos: So in this example, I'm going to take a basic table that's a bit like a default table that you get in PowerPoint. And by adding some images, we're going to make it more engaging and nicer to look at with something like this. So firstly, before we bring in the photos, we're just going to do a few tweaks to the table to improve the look of this on the formatting. So I'm going to firstly make all the font, the Montserrat font that we've been using, because that looks a bit nicer than the Calibri. I'm going to make the title a lighter variation, and grey and a little smaller. Now I'm going to go in and edit the table. So the first thing we'll do is I'll stretch this table up so it fits a bit better. This part here, I don't think this actually needs any color. So I'm just going to go to the home and go to shape fill, and say no fill on this. And then I'm also going to select all of this and make this Montserrat. I'm going to make this grey. I'm now going to turn off all the borders because I think it looks better without borders in this case. So I'll select the table, go to table design, the borders drop-down and then choose no border. And I think that's already looking better. So I'm just going to fill this in one color for now. And I'm going to make all the text in this section white. And I'm also going to put borders just on these sections here. I'm going to make sure that the border is white. And one pixel. There we go. So it's looking a bit closer already. There just a couple more things we're going to do, and then we'll bring in photos. Now we can select these three columns and go to layout and choose distribute columns. That will make them all the same size and the same width. And will just resize up the table slightly. And I'll pull the top down slightly so that will allow us to put the photos above it. You can see it's getting already pretty close to the final look. We can go and get the images, go to insert pictures, this device, and we'll select three images that we're going to use on this table. I'll just roughly size these down. This one needs to be slightly bigger, you can see. I would probably align these so that the wheels are on the same position at the bottom. And then make sure they're roughly the correct sizes in comparison with each other. Now we can go to this image and click on it. And go to picture format, go to rotate and we can flip it horizontally. And this just means it's consistent with the other images and it's easier on the eye for the viewer. Finally, we could select this column here, go to shape fill, then go to the eyedropper tool and take one of the colors from the actual car. You can see it says RGB and the number of red. So if we take that, that's already quite clearly about this car now and it's a lot easier to understand when you're viewing it. We can do the same with this column, just get this brown color in here. And then we'll get a blue color for the final column, each time using the eyedropper tool. So this is a nice clear way of showing easily, the comparisons between these cars. And it's very obvious compared to how we started as to which ones about which car. And just to finish off, it might be quite nice, if we select the table here, go to table design, and we'll select something like a 6pt line, make sure it's white, then we'll draw a line down here. This will just help separate the columns and make it even easier to understand. Now we'll pick up everything and move it roughly to the right place. And the only other thing I'd probably do here is make this text bold. There's our finished slide. You can see it's come a long way since the beginning default slide with just a few simple tweaks. That's what we started with. And this is what we've ended up with. See the power of just using some suitable images and making some small design tweaks can improve a slide considerably.
Alan Lomer, POWERPOINT DESIGNER AND TEACHER
