Issue #100 January 10, 2006

PPT – Search Templates for great images

In two weeks I’ll be doing my web tutorial on Using Digital Photos and one of the topics I’ll be covering is where you can find photos on the web. Microsoft has a large number of photos on their Office Online web site, but one of the undiscovered spots for great photos is the templates that they offer. Microsoft has an Office templates site that offers templates for Word, Excel and PowerPoint. If you go to the site at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/default.aspx, you can search for the word PowerPoint and a term that describes the type of photo you are looking for, like sales for example. In the results, you will see a set of PowerPoint templates that contain images that may be useful for your presentation. To extract the photo, download the template and save it on your computer. Open it up in PowerPoint. The images are likely on the Slide Master. Click View -> Master -> Slide Master. Click on the master that contains the image you want to use (there may be a title master and a slide master). On the master slide, click on the image. It is unlikely that the image is a separate picture, it usually is part of an overall image that is the entire slide background. So when you click on the image, it selects the whole background. That’s OK. Close the slide master and go to the slide you want to place the image on. Paste it and it will likely take up the whole slide or more – not a problem. Because now you are going to crop the parts you don’t want. Click on the photo and in the Picture toolbar (if it isn’t showing, click View -> Toolbars -> Picture), click on the cropping toolbar button, which looks like two plus signs (+) together. The white cirlce resizing handles turn into black bar cropping handles. Grab one of the cropping handles and drag it to eliminate the portions of the picture you do not want to use. You can use any of the handles to crop out parts of the image from whatever side you need to. Now you have just the image you want. You can also crop by double clicking on the image and clicking on the Picture tab and setting the crop from settings to exact measurements. Sometimes I find it helpful to get the approximate crop using the cropping handles, then use the exact cropping measurements to fine tune the crop. The techniques I described today also work for any background image that contains an image you want to use.