Modify a Picture: MS PowerPoint

You have inserted a picture on your slide in PowerPoint and you can see straight away that although it is close to what you had wanted, it's not exactly they way you anted it either. Rather than repeating the process of searching for another picture and then inserting it, you can modify it to suit your specific needs. You can customize pictures and clip art in many ways. Below are some of the ways that you can do this:

• Resize to smaller or larger dimensions
   
• Scale or resize in proportion to the original
   
• Crop or trim off one or more edges
   
• Change to black and white or grayscale
   
• Increase or reduce contrast and brightness

To size and rescale a pictures, follow the steps below:

1. Place the mouse pointer over one of the four corner sizing handles until it turns into a diagonal two-headed arrow.
    
2. Grab the handle and drag in or out. The picture will change sizes but stay in the same scale as the initial picture.
    
3. Place the mouse pointer over an edge sizing handle and drag. This will change the picture's dimensions by elongating or shrinking the height or width an results in a distortion when compared to the original picture.

To use the menus, follow these steps:

Select the picture to be modified and open the dialog box in one of the following ways:

• Click the Format Picture button on the Picture toolbar.
   
• Choose Format | Picture from the menu.
   
• Right-click and choose Format Picture from the shortcut menu.
   
• Click the Size tab to see the dialog box.
   
• Type the exact measurements for height and width in the respective boxes or under Scale, specify a percent to increase or decrease the dimensions relative to the original picture.
   
• Click OK to close the dialog box and effect your changes.

If you should stretch or squash your picture by dragging one of the edge sizing handles, you can restore the picture to its original size by accessing the Format Picture dialog box and clicking the Reset button.

My next article will show you how to crop a picture.

When you become a member at CarolsCornerOffice.com, you have access to this and many, many more articles that include screenshots. Don't delay: visit us today!