In the first two parts of this series, Simon Hurst, FSN writer and spreadsheet guru looked at charts in a PowerPoint presentation, including adding animation to particular chart objects, and then gone on to consider the new Excel 2007 and 2010 SmartArt feature for producing business diagrams. In this, concluding, part he looks at some of the remaining Image and Illustration options in PowerPoint before finishing with a particularly daft finale.
Pictures
Clip art
You might want to include pictures in a presentation either to reinforce a point you are making or to illustrate a product or service. The Clip Art option in the Images group of the Insert ribbon tab allows you to search the Clip Art library for a variety of different types of media. Alternatively, if you insert a new slide using one of the layouts that includes a ‘content’ section, an icon for Clip Art will be one of the six included in the section.
Here we have searched for some Clip Art to demonstrate ‘risk’:
You can optionally ‘Include Office.com content’ if you are connected to the Internet and also restrict the type of results returned rather than considering ‘All media file types’. The available choices are:
- Illustration
- Photographs
- Video
- Audio
In this example we have searched for a video to add to our risks slide:
Depending on the type of content, various options will be available in the Picture Tools, Format ribbon tab. As an example, here we have used the Colour option to recolour our video to match our corporate colour scheme and then used Picture Effects to add a ‘glow’ around the edges and a reflection.
Picture from file
The Picture option within the Images group allows you to choose a picture from a file stored somewhere on your system. Whether you use a picture from a file or one of the Clip Art photographs, then the Excel 2010 Picture Tools Format ribbon introduces some interesting new manipulation tools. Although the tools in Office are still some way short of Photoshop, you can certainly use them to improve the look of your product photo within your presentation. For example, the Background Removal tool makes a fair job of automatically removing unwanted background detail and provides additional tools to further refine what to discard and what to keep:
Here we have removed the background from one of our printers and then added shadows. The shadow adjusts to the new shape of our picture.
Also new in Excel 2010 is a range of ‘Artistic Effects’ such as Chalk Sketch and Blur. These might be slightly less relevant from the point of view of many businesses, but if you do have a use for them note that selecting the effect directly from the Artistic Effects dropdown uses a default version of the effect. You can exercise more control over things like brush size and pressure by choosing your effect from the Artistic Effects Options... dialog.
Shapes
In part 2 we examined the wide range of business diagrams included in the SmartArt collection in Office 2007 and 2010. It is still possible to create your own diagrams using the extensive set of Shapes available. Here we have used the Shapes option within ‘Images’ to insert three shapes. Although there is a specific ‘text box’ shape you can right-click on any shape and use the ‘Edit Text’ option to add text. Also, if you draw a line between two shapes, then, as you hover over each shape, sets of red spots will appear around the shape and if you draw the line from red spot to red spot a ‘connector’ rather than a normal line will be created. The connector remains connected to the red spot position on each shape regardless of where the shape is moved to. In PowerPoint 2003 a similar effect can be achieved by using lines from the ‘connectors’ set of shapes rather than the standard set of lines.
Arrange
Regardless of whether they are shapes, videos, photographs or Clip Art illustrations, PowerPoint includes tools to help you make sure that you don’t ruin the effect of your presentation by failing to align your images neatly. In PowerPoint 2003 the Draw dropdown option on the Drawing toolbar includes an ‘Align or Distribute’ option. In PowerPoint 2007 and 2010, the Drawing Tools and Picture Tools Format ribbons include an Align option in the Arrange group.
Groups of images can be selected either my using shift+click to select additional individual images or by drawing a selection box that encompasses all of each image. Once a group of images is selected then the alignment tools can be used to align them, or the distribution tools used to space them evenly.
It is also possible to combine a set of images into a group. Select the images as described above, then use the Group option from the Arrange group to group them together. They now behave as a single object. So, for example, you can resize the group and all the objects therein will be scaled to fit the new size.
Once you have a group of objects, the Group button dropdown includes an ungroup option to restore them to individual objects.
Ungroup in action
As the finale to this series, we’ll look at a particularly strange use of ‘ungroup’ that is as spectacular as it is probably useless. Select a single Clip Art illustration and choose to ungroup it. Depending on the type of picture, you will probably see a message saying that to ungroup it it needs to be converted into a Microsoft Office Drawing Object. Once you have agreed to this conversion, try the Ungroup option again. The picture should now be a group of dozens of small drawing objects. With them all selected, add an animation such as Entrance, Fly in and set the ‘Start’ option for all the animations to ‘After Previous’. You could also consider a similar exit animation…
