PowerPoint is mainly used for presentations, but it’s also perfect for creating a photo album, that can really show off your images. Rather than just have a slideshow, as you might see using the Windows image viewer, you can add captions, transitions, effects, sounds and even use and create themes. By using PowerPoint, you can change what would otherwise be a fairly standard slideshow into something that’s a lot more fun and exciting!
Step 1
Start PowerPoint and you will see a default slide. This is setup for a presentation, which we don’t really want, so to make life easier, we’ll use on of the built-in templates. This will enable us to create a photo album really quickly, but once you’ve mastered the process, you can always create your own from scratch. Click on the File tab, choose new, then under templates and themes, click on sample templates. There are two photo album templates to choose form, classic and contemporary. Choose the Contemporary one.
Step 2
Many of the elements are already in place; it’s just a matter of replacing them with your own images, and text. Click on the vertical text and put in something like the date the photos were taken. Click on the text that says contemporary photo album, and replace with the title of your album. Now right-click on the picture of the sunflower and choose change picture. This will open your My Pictures folder, so browse for the image you would like to use as the album cover image.
Step 3
The template contains example slides demonstrating different layouts you can use for your slides. You can either edit these, or add your own, new slides, using a different layout. To add a new Slide, Click on the Home tab, then click on New slide and choose your layout for that slide. We’ll chose landscape with caption first, clicking the picture icon to browse for our image, and adding a caption underneath.
Step 4
If you have several pictures that have a common theme, or were taken at one location with different viewpoints, for instance, you could combine them on one page. We’ve chosen a template that uses three pictures in landscape format, and two in portrait format. To give the pictures a bit of depth, why not add a drop-shadow effect, so the pictures appear to be slightly above the page? Right-click a picture and choose Format Picture. Choose shadow, click the presets drop down and choose an Outer shadow. You can use the sliders to change how much effect is applied.
Step 5
Once you have added all your slides, you will need to delete any that are left over from the sample template. In the left-hand slide navigation window, right-click on the slide and choose Delete slide, to remove it. It’s time to add some pizazz! Click on the transitions tab and you will see a number of transitions you can choose from, along the top. Click on a slide and choose a transition, use the options top-right to set the time the transition takes, any sound effect and whether to apply the same transition to all slides. You can also choose whether you move to the next slide after a set time, or if you need to click the mouse. To test the effect, click on the star, under the slide number, in the left-hand window.
Find out more about Microsoft Office 2010 in the video below