Chap 3: Add simple visual enhancements

3.1. Inserting pictures and clip art images

You can add images created and saved in other programs, in addition to digital photographs, to your Microsoft PowerPoint 2013 presentations. Collectively, these types of graphics are known as pictures. You might want to use pictures to make your slides more attractive and visually interesting, but you are more likely to use pictures to convey infor­mation in a way that words cannot. For example, you might display photographs of your company’s new products in a presentation to salespeople.

• If a slide has a content placeholder, insert a picture that is stored on your computer by click­ing the Pictures button in the placeholder. 
• In addition to pictures stored on your computer, you can insert Clip arts from online sources, or your office program. 

3.2. Creating diagrams

Sometimes the concepts you want to convey to an audience are best presented in dia­grams. You can easily create a dynamic, visually appealing diagram by using SmartArt Graphics, which provide predefined sets of formatting for effortlessly putting together various types of diagrams, such as the following:

• Process: These visually describe an ordered set of steps to complete a task.
• Hierarchy: These illustrate the structure of an organization or entity.
• Cycle: These represent a circular sequence of steps, tasks, or events; or the relation­ship of a set of steps, tasks, or events to a central, core element.
• Relationship: These show converging, diverging, overlapping, merging, or containing elements.

Example of a Cycle SmartArt representing the days of a week:

Exercise

Draw the following SmartArt to represent Water Cycle:

3.3. Plotting charts

For those occasions when you want to display a visual representation of numeric data, you can add a chart to a slide. Trends that might not be obvious from looking at the numbers themselves are more obvious in a chart.\

• To deal with charts, select a slide which is to contain the chart and then in the content placeholder, click the Insert Chart button to open the Insert Chart dialog box. 

• Once a chart is created, there are 2 additional tabs: Design and Format. You will use them to edit the chart title, axis titles, legend, to show/hide the data table, etc.

3.4. Adding transitions

When you deliver a presentation, you can move from slide to slide by clicking the mouse button or you can have PowerPoint replace one slide with the next at predetermined inter­vals. To avoid abrupt breaks between slides, you can use transitions to control the way slides move on and off the screen. Each slide can have only one transition. You can set the transi­tion for one slide at a time, for a group of slides, or for an entire presentation.

PowerPoint comes with the following categories of built-in transition effects:

• Subtle: This category includes fades, wipes, and a shutter-like effect.
• Exciting: This category includes more dramatic effects such as checkerboards, ripples, turning, and zooming.
• Dynamic Content: This category holds the background of the slides still and applies a dynamic effect to the title and other content, such as rotating or flying onto the slide.

In addition to selecting the type of transition, you can specify the following:

• The sound
• The speed
• When the transition occurs (called the slide timing)

To apply a transition, on the Transitions tab, in the Transition to This Slide group, click each thumbnail that is visible in the gallery to view its effects. 

• In the Transition to This Slide group, click the Effect Options button, and then click From Top-Left.
• To add this transition to all the slides in the presentation. In the Timing group, click the Apply To All button.