Picture Pile Effect in PowerPoint

Placing many pictures in PowerPoint can sometimes look quite boring. Here's a way to spruce it up: the "Picture Pile" effect.



This is quite simple to do.

1. Insert the pictures you want


2. Add a frame (choose one of the white ones from the Picture Styles gallery if you're using PowerPoint 2007, or just add a thick outline in older versions of PowerPoint)


3. Rotate each image a bit, and scatter them around!


4. Done.

PowerPoint samples are included here:

• PowerPoint 2007 version


• PowerPoint 97-2003 version

Extreme PowerPoint

My friend introduced me to this website called PowerPoint Heaven recently, and it features lots of cool effects you can achieve in PowerPoint.

Some of the stuff there are really extreme, for example the games. If you open them in PowerPoint you find things like "Rectangle 576" - meaning that there are hundreds of elements on one slide. In fact some of the things there strongly recommend you turn on hardware acceleration in PowerPoint (well maybe you didn't know there was such a thing eh?) or performance will suffer (due to the many elements). And there's aggressive use of triggers (when a custom animation happens because you click something - I didn't know about this before either). The effects are mostly PowerPoint XP/2003 only, because only from PowerPoint XP onwards had the advanced custom animation been added.

However there are a few tips on the website that are applicable to everyday PowerPoint use, and you might want to take a look.

Give your PowerPoint Shapes a more professional look

Note: If you're using PowerPoint 2007, don't bother reading this, because PowerPoint 2007 already has the following effects in the gallery and thus can be achieved with one click!

Shapes in PowerPoint always look flat like this:


Now what about this?


Here's how to do it:

1. Remove outlines


2. Add shadows


3. Change background colour to gradient


4. Change text font/colour/size

Yes it's that simple... here's a sample PowerPoint presentation that illustrates the above steps.

Anyway the above tips are also applicable to Word as well, in case you want to make the shapes in Word look nicer.