MarkHastings

PowerPoint: Layout photos for future insertion

I have a problem I need to solve. I don't deal with PowerPoint a lot, so I need to know if this is even possible.

I need to design a "book" for a corporate meeting. The book will be comprised of all the people who attended. There will be a digital photographer on site, taking head shots...

I need to create a PPT file where I can have placeholder images that a novice can then insert the digital head shots in and have them stay in place.

What I mean is, inserting photos won't do the trick because they all have to be resized after importing. I need to specify a specific size and no matter what the photo sizes will be, they will all import and constrain to this specific size.

Is this possible? Can it be made easily enough so that the person just double clicks a picture and replaces it with a digital head shot (and it imports at a constrained size)???

Thoughts?

thanks

DaveF

Re: PowerPoint: Layout photos for future insertion

Yes and no.

You can format slides with pre-arranged "content" sections. In PowerPoint 2003 (and 2000 I think), these are content squares with a little 2x3 icon block composed of mini-buttons. One button looks like a sun over a mountain; the tool-tip is "Insert Picture" and does just that. Clicking that button brings a file browser to select and insert an image.

The inserted image will be sized to fit the content frame, but maintaining its aspect ratio and centered in the frame if it's not the same size.
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So, yes, you can easily create a template in PowerPoint for someone to insert pictures spanning multiple pages. It will take some pre-planning if the images must
be specifically sized "just so."

If you want, give me an email and I can send a quick template to illustrate.

MarkHastings

Re: PowerPoint: Layout photos for future insertion

Dave, thanks for the reply. I actually just tried the content slide here at home because I have 2003 here and it seems to do what I want. I have 2002 at work and it didn't do the same thing. I'll have to see if we have 2003 at work because it seems like that's what I need.

But now that I got that out of the way, is there any way to get one of those content areas (with the icons that launch the browse dialogue box) to be part of the master slide? I want the user to be able to create a new slide and have that content box load every time.

It seems like you can't add one of those to the master slide. I see it in the Content Layout section, but you have to apply it to each new slide. There's got to be another way.

DaveF

Re: PowerPoint: Layout photos for future insertion

I don't think so. A quick look at the master slide confirms this. I won't say it's impossible: I'm don't use Master Slides beyond their basic purpose: presentation-wide fonts, bullets, and general layouts.

But with a pre-defined slide to follow, it's easy to copy / paste that slide format to add more pages as needed. Ctrl-D will duplicate a slide, so a blank (template) can trivally be copied as more are needed.

I realize this is not quite as slick as I thought: it's not obvious how to manually create those content-boxes. If you need 1 - 4 on a page, the pre-made layouts will work. But if you need a fifth, you may be out of luck.

If ease of use is more important than style control, perhaps the Photo Album will help: Insert->Picture->New Photo Album. Search the help for "PowerPoint Photo Album"

MarkHastings

Re: PowerPoint: Layout photos for future insertion

Yeah, that's what I ended up telling her to do. Unfortunately (as is the case here) things are always last minute and it would have been easier for us to upgrade to 2003, but they don't sell PPT 2003 upgrades at the store and we can't wait for it to be delivered.

The only thing I found was the full version of Office 2003 at Staples, but since we'd have to buy a $500 copy for me, as well as the person going to the meeting, we decided to work with what we have (i.e. Powerpoint 2002).

I am just going to have the PowerPoint person run a batch in Photoshop to resize the photos to the same size as the Content slides in PPT. That way, she won't have to resize them once they are imported into Powerpoint.

I also created guides so she can then move the photos into place once they import...which would have been great with 2003 because she wouldn't have had to worry about resizing in Photoshop or moving the photos into place...

Oh well, this is not the best/quickest solution, but it'll have to do. I know it's going to be INSANE at the meeting and she will be working late, so I wanted to help her out as much as I could by making less steps...

Thanks again.

p.s. It does suck that you can't add those content areas to the master slide.