Powerful PowerPoint for Educators: Using Visual Basic for Applications to Make PowerPoint Interactive

In sert ing Pic tures
You can in sert pic tures into a PowerPoint presentation in several dif ferent
ways, in cluding by in serting from the clip art li brary, by in serting from an ex ist-
ing file, and by copying and pasting from an other place, in cluding the World
Wide Web. In ad dition, if you are ar tistically in clined, you can use the drawing
tools to draw your own pictures. Gen erally pictures are em bedded in your
PowerPoint presentation. That is, once you insert them, they become part of the
presentation, regardless of what happens to the original picture.
PowerPoint recognizes many dif ferent types of picture files, in cluding
most of the common ones you are likely to en counter, such as Graphic In ter-
change For mat (.gif), Joint Pho tographic Ex perts Group (.jpg), Tag Im age File
Format (.tif or .tiff), and Bitmap (.bmp). If you try to in sert a picture into your
In sert ing Pic tures 15

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presentation and PowerPoint gives you an error or asks you how to con vert it,
you will need to find a program (such as GraphicConverter™ or Adobe
Photoshop™) that can read that file type and cre ate files of one of the types that
PowerPoint can read.
To in sert a picture from a file, choose “Pic ture” from the In sert menu and
choose “From File . . . ” from the flyout menu (see Fig ure 2.2).
Figure 2.2. Choosing In sert Pic ture From File from the Menu
Although the dialog box you see will vary slightly de pending upon which ver -
sion of PowerPoint you are using, it should look similar to the di alog box you see
whenever you try to open a file on your computer. From this point, lo cate the file
with the picture you want to insert and click on the “In sert” button.
While in serting a pic ture from a file has remained fairly con sistent from
version to version of PowerPoint, in serting clip art has changed quite a bit. You
start by choosing “Clip Art . . . ” from the flyout menu in stead of “From File . . . ”
(see Fig ure 2.2). In PowerPoint 2002, you can search for clip art us ing the dialog
shown in Fig ure 2.3, use the Clip Or ganizer, or search Microsoft’s fairly ex ten-
sive col lection of clip art on the Web. From Microsoft’s Web col lection, you can
download clip art into your own col lection so you can use it later without going
to the Web.
16 Tra di tional Mul ti me dia Fea tures of PowerPoint

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