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.

You can use the techniques described in this article whenever you have a group of images whose content are at the core of the presentation you need to create. One example might be giving a presentation to introduce a new range of products based around a series of product photos.

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 window appears, you begin identifying the images you want included in the presentation. You can click on the button marked File/Disk to browse for the images or you can import them straight from your digital camera or scanner.

The Photo Album window is very versatile. Once, you have imported your pictures, it allows you to reorder them by selecting and image and clicking on the up and down arrows. If you change your mind and decide to delete an image, no problem. Just click on the name of the image then click the Remove button.

Is the orientation of any of our images not quite right for this presentation? No problem. Just highlight the image then click on the rotate icon to change it. Not happy with the tonal qualities of an image? No problem. Click on the appropriate button to increase or decrease the contrast or brightness levels.

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.

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.

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!