Real World Computing

The Smart Art tools on the Ribbon let you customise the diagram in myriad ways. You can change the colours or effects on the diagram, and Live Preview shows you what your diagram will look like just by hovering over the option in the gallery. You can add glow, shadow, bevels, glints and 3D perspective with one click, and you can control each aspect of every block. You can select one particular block in the diagram and change its appearance to highlight it. A technique I like to use is to copy the block or blocks I want to highlight, change the colour and position the copy over the original block in the underlying diagram. This extra block can then be made to fade in on a separate mouse click so the block looks like it's changing colour.

There are Smart Art templates to illustrate lists, processes, cycles, hierarchies, relationships, matrices and pyramids, and some templates have placeholders for images as well as text. Using Smart Art to create diagrams takes seconds compared to the hours it used to take altering the blocks by hand.

Pictures

I stand by my advice from ten years ago to use clip-art sparingly. You don't need to fill up all the available space on every slide, and illustrations should be relevant, so don't clutter your slides. Clip-art can be distracting, and poor-quality clip-art will make any presentation look cheap. There's a vast array available, but I'd recommend you don't use any, use photographs instead.

When digital photography was in its infancy, getting real photos into a presentation was challenging: you either had to have an expensive scanner or get your film developed onto PhotoCD at extra expense. Screens were limited in the number of colours they could display and memory, in terms of RAM and disk space, was limited. Ten years on, virtually everyone has a digital camera, all displays can show 16 million colours, and we aren't constrained by memory shortage, either in the computer or the media on which we store presentations. Photographs grab the attention of the audience in a way that naff clip-art never can. There's a growing range of photographs in the Microsoft Office Online clip-art library, and when searching for clip-art I generally untick all the media types except photograph.

Of course, you can use your own photographs from your digital camera, but do remember to crop, rotate or flip them to suit the slide you're illustrating: crop for relevance so the subject isn't swamped by background; rotate to ensure the subject is the right way up; flip so the subject of the picture faces the text in the slide. I'd recommend you use Office Picture Manager (one of the free Microsoft Office Tools) or some other image-manipulation program to correct the brightness, contrast and colour balance of your pictures before you put them into your presentation. The easiest way is to select the picture and choose Auto Correct (or the equivalent in another package). This generally makes the picture look brighter, more colourful and gives it more impact.

When you insert a picture into PowerPoint 2007, you can add many new effects to it with a couple of clicks. Borders, bevels, reflections, glows, shadows and 3D effects are all child's play. There's a gallery of pre-built options to choose from - hover over an item in the gallery and see it applied to your picture. Click if you like it or move on to try another option. Tweak any aspect of the picture you like. You can recolour the picture to match the colour scheme of the presentation. Position the picture exactly where you want it, but remember to drag the corner handles to resize it, not the side handles, to avoid squashing the image proportions. If you want all your pictures to look the same, select one, format it, then double-click on the Format Painter icon on the Home tab of the Ribbon. This makes the format painter tool stick on and you can visit each picture in your presentation and apply that formatting.

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