PowerPoint presentations are a superb tool for getting a message across to an audience, to potential clients and to your own company and images are great for adding impact to a PowerPoint presentation. So much so that PowerPoint includes a feature that lets you automatically create a complete presentation from a group of images.

Naturally, creating a presentation in this way can only be done if the pictures relate very closely to the main content of your presentation. One example might be a presentation given during product training which requires detailed photographs of each product.

You begin by choosing New from the File menu which displays the New Presentation task pane on the right of your screen. In the New Presentation task pane window, you click on the option marked “Photo Album”.

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.

However important a part your images will play in the presentation, every presentation will need some text. The Picture Layout drop-down menu lets you specify whether you want one, two or four images with a title. (You can omit the title, though it is unlikely you will wan to do so.) You can also place the title above or below the image.

If you wish, you can also change the shape of your images. This is done in a drop-down menu called Frame Shape. The default shape is rectangular but also available are rounded rectangle, bevelled, oval, corner tabs, square tabs and plaque tabs.

Finally, click OK to create the presentation. To finish it off, you just need to click in the title box of each slide and add your text. And that’s it, a bona fide PowerPoint presentation automatically created from a bunch of images!