Sometimes there may be part of the image that you want to crop out and not use.
Just click the Crop command in the Size group and you'll see black crop handles appear.
The black corner crop handles will crop the picture and retain its proportions.
Just click the handle and while holding down the mouse button, drag the handle to the desired
area, and then release the button. Or, you could just crop a little of the top
or the side part of the image. And there you go, your image is cropped.
If you have specific dimensions that you need your picture to be, PowerPoint does give you
the ability to set the crop to specific measurements here in the Size group.
Over on the left in the Adjust group you have some commands that will change your picture
in various ways. The one I probably use the most is the Compress
Pictures command. Large file sizes can really make your PowerPoint
slides load and display slowly and can be difficult or impossible to send the presentation
by email. To compress the picture, just click the command.
The Compress Pictures dialog box appears. Here you can choose to only compress the picture
that is selected, or you can go ahead and compress all the pictures in the slide show.
You can click OK to compress the pictures. If you want to change the default compression
settings, click the Options button. In the Compression Settings dialog box that
appears you can make some choices about your options and the type of output, or how you'll
use your PowerPoint presentation. Then click OK.
The default settings have always been sufficient for my needs.
Some of the other commands allow you to change the brightness or contrast of color in the
image. You can just click each of these commands
to display a menu of options. I sometimes use the Brightness command to
lighten some of my images that are a little dark, or were taken without the camera flash.
The Recolor command lets you change the picture to black and white, Sepia, or other fun color
tones. The Reset Picture command removes all the
formatting changes you made to the picture and changes it back to the original that you
inserted, and the Change Picture command opens up a dialog box so you can switch to a different
picture on your computer. Now that we've inserted a picture and modified
it using all these great PowerPoint features, let's take a look at the clip art feature.
I need a 4th slide so I can include instructions for a group activity and include a clip art
image. The title of this one will be Team Exercise.
And I want an image here that will look good with the instructions I'll add here later.
The team exercise involves trying to get a teammate across a log bridge successfully.
I don't have any pictures on my computer that seem right for this slide.
To take a look at available clip art, I can click the Clip Art command in the placeholder,
or select the Insert tab, and choose the Clip Art command in the Illustrations group.
Whichever way you choose, the Clip Art task pane appears on the right.
In the Search for field we will enter some words that describe the type of picture we
are looking for. In the Search in: drop-down menu we will select
the clip art collections that we want to search to find the image.
By default, all the collections are chosen. We'll just leave that as it is so PowerPoint
will search our computer and Office Online for images.
Then, we can choose the type of media file to look for.
Clip Art illustrations include traditional clip art that looks more like drawings or
cartoon images, photographs, movies, and sounds. I actually only want photographs in this presentation.
And now we're ready to click Go. It may take a bit for all the results to display
as PowerPoint searches for images you can use.
Now we can just scroll through and look at our options.
You'll notice the world icon on some of these and that means the image is from a Web collection.
If you don't see one you like, don't worry. You can always try different search words
or click the Office Online link to go to the Microsoft website and search the thousands
of clip arts available. But, here I think this one will work.
To insert it, you can just click the image, or click the drop-down arrow next to the image
to see some of your Options. From here, you can copy this image to your
collection, find similar styles, or go ahead and Insert it.
Just click it, and the clip art appears in the slide.
Notice now that the same Picture Tools Format tab appears on the Ribbon when the clip art
is selected. You can modify the clip art in all the same
ways that you modified the picture on slide 2.
It is easy to insert pictures and clip art and the picture tools really allow you to
modify the images in interesting ways. I think well-placed pictures can really make
people go "Wow" when they see your presentation, and PowerPoint gives you the
tools to do it. Spend some time exploring pictures and clip
art for yourself.