PowerPoint presentations are a great way of communicating and influencing your clients, work colleagues or audience. One of the most important components within presentations are images. This article will show you how to take a group of images and turn them, as if by magic, into a PowerPoint presentation.

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

To get started you need to bring up the New Presentation task pane. To do this, choose File – New. Next, click on “Photo Album” in the New Presentation task pane window.

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

The imported images are ordered alphabetically, so you will almost certainly want to reorder them to coincide with the narrative of your presentation. This is achieved by selecting one or more images and clicking on the arrow icons to move them up or down in the order. You can also highlight one or more images and click Remove to delete them from the presentation.

Next, you can check the tonal quality of each image. You can increase or decrease the brightness or contrast as necessary by just clicking on one of the four image control icons. In addition, you can rotate images clockwise or anti-clockwise by clicking on one of the two image transformation icons.

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

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

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