PowerPoint Basics: Create a Photo Slide Show

Transcription

1 PowerPoint Basics: Create a Photo Slide Show P 570 / 1 Here s an Enjoyable Way to Learn How to Use Microsoft PowerPoint Microsoft PowerPoint is a program included with all versions of Microsoft Office. While it isn t the most useful of programs for home users, a popular use of PowerPoint is to create slide shows of photos. In this article, I ll show you how to put together a slide show of your own photos in a format suitable to to friends and family. Along the way, we ll cover all the basics of getting started with Microsoft PowerPoint. By Sheila Reeves Microsoft PowerPoint 2007/2003/2002 The First Step: A Title Page for Your Slide Show... Add New Slides Containing Your Pictures... The Finishing Touch: Adding Animations!... How to Save Your Finished Slide Show... This article shows you how to: P 570 / 4 P 570 / 6 P 570 / 12 P 570 / Use Microsoft PowerPoint to create a slide show of pictures... Arrange your slides into any order you like... Add style with built-in colour schemes and animations 35

2 P 570 / 2 PowerPoint is included in all editions of Microsoft Office Its main use is for business presentations What s the Point of PowerPoint? Microsoft Office was originally aimed at business users, as its name suggests, but when Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel became popular with home users too, Microsoft introduced cheaper editions of Office designed to be more affordable for the rest of us. The 2007 edition of Office comes in a Home and Student edition which can be bought for around 90. Whichever edition of Office you have, and whether it s the latest 2007 version or an older version, it will include a copy of Microsoft PowerPoint. For some reason, Microsoft regards it as one of the staple ingredients of Office, but what is it actually for? PowerPoint is mostly used to design business presentations. If you were getting up in front of a crowd to pitch a product or explain a strategy, you d quite likely try to keep your audience awake by accompanying your talk with a PowerPoint presentation: a series of slides illustrating your main points by means of bulleted lists, charts, pictures, and so on. 36

3 P 570 / 3 Since the presentation is usually displayed on a computer screen near the speaker, the contents of each slide are purposely kept large and simple in order to make them easily visible to everyone in the audience. The aim is simply to highlight the main points of the speech, and the speaker moves from slide to slide as their talk progresses. As home users, few of us can see much need to create that type of presentation, but another popular use of PowerPoint is in creating simple slide shows of pictures. You may well have received this type of slide show as an attachment in the past. In most cases, they are sequences of images that tell a story, like a cartoon-strip, and placing the pictures in a PowerPoint slide show ensures that everyone sees the pictures in the intended order something that can t be guaranteed if you send the pictures as a loose collection of files. As well as determining the order in which the photos are shown, other benefits of a photo slide show are that you can type a caption for each picture, and include stylish transition effects such as fades and dissolves to move from one slide to the next. Over the coming pages, I ll show you how to create a PowerPoint slide show of your own photos. This will be a completely self-contained file that you can send by to friends and family members. I ll keep things deliberately simple and avoid getting tangled in any of PowerPoint s more complicated features, but along the way I ll point out a few options you might like to experiment with. PowerPoint is ideal for creating photo slide shows 37

4 P 570 / 4 The First Step: A Title Page for Your Slide Show If you re ready, let s get started. We ll begin by creating a simple title page an introductory slide that will appear when someone launches the slide show. Follow these steps: 1. Start Microsoft PowerPoint from the Start menu. Depending on your version of Office, and your version of Windows, you may find it on the All Programs (or Programs) section of the Start menu, or it may be within a folder named Microsoft Office. 2. When the program appears, it will look similar to the window pictured in the following screenshot. A thin strip running down the left side of the window shows tiny pictures ( thumbnails ) of the slides you ve created so far: to get you started, PowerPoint has created a single slide which you ll see in this list. In the main part of the window you ll see the slide you re currently working on, and this is where all your design work takes place. Thumbnail pictures of the slides you ve created The slide you re currently designing 38

5 P 570 / 5 3. The single slide PowerPoint has created for us is a title slide, and you can probably see straight away what we re supposed to do with it. Click the words Click to add title (which makes them disappear), and then type a title for your slide show. Next, click the words Click to add subtitle and type a subtitle. When you ve finished, the result might look something like this: The slide includes simple instructions Click where indicated and type a title and a subtitle In the subtitle, after the first sentence I ve pressed Enter to create a new line and then typed Click to continue. This is because anyone viewing the slide show will click each slide to move to the next, and not everyone will realise this. Adding this little tip is a good idea as it ensures people won t sit gazing at this title slide expecting something to happen! 4. If you look at the little thumbnail in the left column, you ll see that it s been updated to show how your slide now looks. As you create more slides, these thumbnails help you see what you ve done so far. 39

6 P 570 / 6 Click text to make changes to it Easily undo mistakes That s your first slide complete! Before we move on, I ll give you a few quick tips. You may prefer not to experiment with these now, but they re worth knowing for the future: If you want to edit any of the text you ve typed, just click it. Each item of text appears in its own box, and the boxes outlines disappear when you click somewhere else, but they ll reappear when you click the text and you ll be able to edit it in any way you like. You can delete any of these boxes you don t need. For instance, if you don t want to include a subtitle, you can delete that box. Click the subtitle text to make its outline appear, then click on the outline itself (avoiding the eight little blobs that appear around it) and press the Delete key on your keyboard. Although PowerPoint gives you a preset font, text size and colour in each box, you don t have to put up with it! Just as you would in Microsoft Word or any other word processor, you can highlight the text in a box and use the familiar options on the toolbar to pick different fonts, sizes, styles and colours. If you make a mistake (such as accidentally moving or deleting something), remember the magic Undo shortcut: just press Ctrl+Z to undo the change. Add New Slides Containing Your Pictures This is where things really get going. For each picture you want to include in your slide show, 40

7 P 570 / 7 you ll create a new slide, insert the picture into it and (if you choose to) type a caption. Here s how to do that: 1. The first thing we need to do is add another slide to our project. Right-click anywhere in the column at the left of the window where the thumbnails appear. (You can right-click in a blank space in that column, or on one of the thumbnails it doesn t matter.) 2. On the context menu that appears, choose New Slide. Right-click in the thumbnails column Choose New Slide 3. PowerPoint will add a new slide to your project: you ll see its thumbnail appear at the left of the window, and its design filling the main part of the window. 4. The precise layout of this new slide varies from one version of PowerPoint to another, but one thing s for sure: it s not the layout we want! We d like a simple layout that gives space to insert a picture and space to type a caption, with nothing else. Fortunately, PowerPoint offers a variety of slide layouts, and we can pick a more suitable one. Just follow the appropriate step for your version of PowerPoint: We need to choose a different slide layout 41

8 P 570 / 8 PowerPoint 2007: right-click the new thumbnail that s just been added to the left column, move the mouse down to Layout and a panel will appear showing a choice of layouts. Choose the layout named Picture with Caption. Right-click the new slide s thumbnail Move to Layout Click the Picture with Caption layout PowerPoint 2003/2002: look at the right side of the PowerPoint window and you should see the panel indicated in the next screenshot. (If you can t, choose View > Task Pane to make it appear.) In the Content Layouts section of this panel, choose the layout named Title and Content. (Hold the mouse over each layout in turn to see their names appear in a little yellow tooltip.) 42

9 P 570 / 9 Click the Title and Content layout As we re keeping things as simple as possible, we re using PowerPoint s built-in slide layouts rather than designing our own. As a result, if you re not using PowerPoint 2007 you ll see a few differences between my layout and your own: PowerPoint 2007 has a special layout for pictures with space for a title and extra text below the picture, whereas the best layout we have available in earlier versions of PowerPoint has the title at the top, the picture below, and no space for extra text. 5. Now we re ready to add a picture to the slide. In PowerPoint 2007, click the pale-blue picture icon that appears in the middle of the slide. In other versions of PowerPoint you ll see a box containing six little icons: click the icon in the bottom left corner of this box: Click this button in PowerPoint 2003/ Now you ll see a normal file dialog showing the contents of your Pictures (or My Pictures) folder. Choose the picture you want to add to this slide in the usual way. 43

10 P 570 / The picture you ve chosen will appear in the slide, neatly sized to fit inside the box created for it. If you chose the wrong picture by mistake, just click the picture on the slide and press Delete on your keyboard to remove it, and you can return to step 5 to pick a different picture to use. However, don t worry about whether you re adding pictures in the right order: after creating all your picture slides, you can easily adjust the order in which they appear, as I ll explain later. 8. The last thing you need to do with this slide is to add some text, and this is done in exactly the same way you did it on the title slide: click the words Click to add title and type a caption for the picture. In PowerPoint 2007, you can also type some extra text below the caption in the same way. If you d prefer not to have any extra text (or indeed not to have a caption), a simple trick is just to type a space. Click the text boxes to add text to the slide 44

11 P 570 / Congratulations that s your first photo slide finished. The next step is to add more slides in the same way, of course, so go back to step 1 on page 7 to create another. (If you use PowerPoint 2007, the steps should be slightly quicker this time, because PowerPoint should remember which slide layout you ve just used, and the next slide you add will have the same layout.) Add more slides in the same way To make changes to any of the slides you ve created, just click the corresponding thumbnail in the column at the left of the window. That slide will reappear and you can change it in any way you like. Organise Your Slides and Add a Touch of Style! When you ve added a slide for each of the photos you want to include in your slide show, you re almost finished. One thing you may want to do is to adjust the order of the slides and that s an easy job: using the thumbnails column at the left of the window, just click-and-drag a thumbnail upwards or downwards and drop it into a new position. Now, what about the design of those slides? The plain white appearance is a little dull, but we don t have to settle for that PowerPoint includes a collection of built-in designs we can use: PowerPoint 2007: Click the Design tab on the Ribbon, and you ll see a wide section labelled Themes containing little pictures of the available slide designs. There are 20 themes available, and you can use the little buttons at the right of the pictures to scroll Drag the thumbnails to reorganise slides Apply a design theme to your slides 45

12 P 570 / 12 through them. Click one of the pictures to apply it to your slides and see how it looks in action. (You may find that these themes look much more effective in your slides than their little pictures would suggest.) Select the Design tab Click a theme to apply it to your slides Click designs to audition them PowerPoint 2003/2002: Choose Format > Slide Design and you ll see a new panel appear at the right of the PowerPoint window. This panel contains little pictures of the available slide designs: click any of these pictures to apply its design to your slides until you find one you like. The Finishing Touch: Adding Animations! As users click through your slide show, each slide will simply appear on the screen in place of the last. Let s make things more attractive by adding animation, so that each slide fades, wipes or dissolves smoothly into the next: 46

13 P 570 / 13 PowerPoint 2007: Choose the Animations tab on the Ribbon and you ll see a box similar to the Themes box we were just using. Each item in this box is an animation, and there are nearly 60 to choose from. Again, use the little buttons to the right of the box to scroll through them. Simply hold the mouse over one of the little pictures and PowerPoint will apply that animation to the slide that s currently on the screen. When you find an animation you want to use, click it once to select it and then click the words Apply To All to apply this animation to all your slides. Hover over an animation to audition it Click the animation you want to use Click Apply To All PowerPoint 2003/2002: Open the Slide Show menu and choose Animation Schemes. The panel at the right of the PowerPoint window will show a list of animations grouped into three categories: Subtle, Moderate and Exciting. Click any of the animations to see it in action. When you find the one you want to use, click the Apply To All Slides button below the list to apply the same animation to all your slides. Click animations to try them out How to Save Your Finished Slide Show The final step is to save your slide show in a format you can send to others. PowerPoint allows you to save the result in several different formats, the two primary formats being a Presentation and a Slide Show. As you might 47

14 P 570 / 14 have guessed, we want to save it as a Slide Show. Here s how to do that: PowerPoint 2007: 1. Click the circular Office button at the top left of the PowerPoint window. 2. Move the mouse down to Save As, then move to the right and click Other Formats. 3. In the Save As dialog that appears, we need to change the format shown in the Save as type box. Open this box, which will show a long list of options, and choose PowerPoint Show. (Be careful to choose the right one as there are several items that start with PowerPoint !) 4. PowerPoint suggests a name for your file based on the title you typed into the first slide, but feel free to type a different name into the File name box. 5. Finally, click the Save button to save the file. PowerPoint 2003/2002: 1. Open the File menu and choose Save As. 2. In the Save As dialog that appears, open the drop-down list beside Save as type and choose PowerPoint Show. 3. You ll see that PowerPoint has suggested a name for your file based on the title you typed into the first slide, but feel free to type a different name into the File name box. 4. Finally, click the Save button to save the file. 48

15 P 570 / 15 Viewing and Sharing Your Photo Slide Show To view your slide show on your own computer, open the folder in which you saved it (this will be your Documents or My Documents folder unless you chose somewhere different in the Save As dialog), and double-click the file. The slide show will fill your entire screen and, as I mentioned earlier, you advance from slide to slide by clicking anywhere on the screen when you re ready. After the final slide is shown, you ll see a black screen with the words End of slide show, click to Exit at the top, and one final click on the screen will close your slide show. After seeing the slide show you may decide to make changes. If you still have the project open in PowerPoint, you can edit the slides as you like and press Ctrl+S to update the saved file. You can also edit it at any time in the future: start PowerPoint in the usual way, and then choose Office button > Open in PowerPoint 2007, or File > Open in PowerPoint 2003/2002, and select your slide show file to open it for editing, pressing Ctrl+S to save your changes afterwards. You can share this slide show with friends and family by attaching it to an message or copying it to a blank CD-ROM or DVD. If you send the slide show file to someone who has a version of PowerPoint installed on their computer, they can simply double-click the file to play it. However, things are not quite as simple for anyone who doesn t have PowerPoint installed on their computer, and Windows may just display Double-click your slide show file to view it You can share this file by 49

16 P 570 / 16 Your friends may need the free PowerPoint Viewer program an error message asking them to create an association in the Folder Options Control Panel. Luckily, as we ve mentioned before in PC Knowledge for Seniors, Microsoft provides a free PowerPoint Viewer program that enables anyone to view PowerPoint slide shows they receive without having to go out and buy a copy of PowerPoint itself. When you send someone a PowerPoint slide show, it s a good idea to include a quick note like the following to tell them how to find the PowerPoint Viewer if they need it: You can download the free PowerPoint Viewer to display this slide show by visiting this web page: or by visiting and searching for the words powerpoint viewer. There are actually two versions of PowerPoint Viewer available: a 2003 version and a newer 2007 version. The 2003 version is much smaller, making it quicker to download, and this is the version available from the web page mentioned above. If you created your slide show using PowerPoint 2007, this older Viewer program will still be able to play it as long as you remembered to save your finished slide show as a PowerPoint Show. 50