Monday, June 16th, 2014

Resize and Position Photos in SmartArt Placeholders

 

Yikes! Just how do you resize a photo inside a PowerPoint or Word SmartArt placeholder

I got an email from a reader this morning. He has a PowerPoint slide (but it could as easily be a Word document or an Excel worksheet) and he wants to size a photo inside a placeholder. You see he was making an organization chart and he was dealing with lots of different head shots – all photographed differently. He wanted to make the faces the same relative size inside the placeholders – but to do this he had to get access to the photos inside the placeholders.

You see that’s the problem, every time you right click the placeholder and choose Size and Position you’re affecting the placeholder not the thing inside it! The solution is to use the Crop tool – so click on the placeholder and choose Picture Tools > Format tab and click the Crop tool.

Now you get handles around your photo and you can drag the handles to resize the image and you can move it to change its position inside the placeholder. When you’re done, click Crop again to finish. Easy when you know how.

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

PowerPoint Placeholders

One of the long awaited features of PowerPoint 2007 is its ability to format a two column placeholder for a slide.

This lets you place multiple columns of text inside a single text placeholder.

To do this you will need to be working in Normal mode so choose View > Normal.

Click the text placeholder that contains the text that you want to display in multiple columns and from the Home tab click the Columns button in the Paragraphs group.

Select the number of columns to split the text into and it will be automatically adjusted to suit.

Simple when you know how?

Helen Bradley

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

Placeholders in PowerPoint 2007

One new feature of PowerPoint 2007 is that you can now add your own placeholders to PowerPoint slide layouts.

In past versions of PowerPoint each slide could have only one text placeholder that would behave as a PowerPoint text placeholder – you could add text boxes but the text couldn’t be formatted in them the same way as it could when you used a placeholder. Now you can have multiple text placeholders on a slide.

To see these at work, choose View > Slide Master to move to the Slide Master View and then click the Slide Master tab at the left of the Ribbon.

Select the master that you want to add an additional placeholder to and select Insert Placeholder from the ribbon.

From the list, select the type of placeholder to use – these include placeholders for text, picture, chart, table, SmartArt, media and clipart. You can, if desired, add multiples of these placeholders to a slide so you can have a slide layout that has all the elements on it that you need.

For example, you may wish to have a text placeholder next to a chart or text and a picture located side by side. Each placeholder can be sized and positioned anywhere on the slide.

Helen Bradley

Tuesday, February 13th, 2007

Make room for graphics in Publisher

When you’re working on a Publisher document, chances are you may not have all the final images in hand. If you’re waiting on graphics, you can add a placeholder for each image to your Publisher file so you can allocate the space for the images and so everything else can be finalized in the meantime.

To do this, click Picture Frame and choose Empty Picture Frame then drag a frame into your document. Size it to the size required. Later, when the image comes in, you can add it to your placeholder by right clicking the placeholder and choose Change Picture, From File and locate the file to use.

Helen Bradley