PowerPoint presentations are a great way of communicating and influencing your clients, work colleagues or audience. One of the most important components within presentations are images. This article will show you how to take a group of images and turn them, as if by magic, into a PowerPoint presentation.

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.

Creating a presentation in this way makes use of a PowerPoint feature called Photo Album. To access this feature, click on New in the File menu. Next, in the New Presentation task pane which appears on the right of your screen, click on 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.

Your images are imported and listed in alphabetical order. This is almost certainly not the order in which you want them to appear in your presentation. So the next step is to rearrange them by clicking on the arrow icons to move selected images up or down in the list. You can also remove images from the list by clicking the name of the image and clicking the Remove button.

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.

Not many presentations will consist solely of images. So the next step will be to specify the layout of text and images. The Picture Layout drop-down menu lets you choose one, two or four images per slide either with or without a title and a separate check-box lets you specify whether the title will be displayed below the image or above it.

Next, there is the shape of the image. In the drop-down menu labelled Frame Shape, you can choose rounded rectangle, bevelled, oval, corner tabs, square tabs and plaque tabs. If you don't want anything fancy, just leave the shape set to the default value of rectangle.

That's pretty much it. Click OK to exit the Photo Album dialogue box and PowerPoint will go ahead and create your presentation using the images and parameters you just specified. Add some text into the title box on each slide and your presentation is good to go!