Tutorial: Creating Blank Slides and Converting Slides to JPGs

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		Tutorial: Creating Blank Slides and Converting Slides to JPGs Overview Step 1: Creating blank slides Step 2:  Saving slides as JPEGs.

Overview

Often, when you begin working with images in a digital story using Photo Story 3, you quickly discover that you want to use blank slides for text. Unfortunately, Photo Story 3 does not have an option for blank slides. But, an easy way to add blank slides is to create colored slides in PowerPoint as jpgs and then to import them into Photo Story 3. The tutorial below will guide you through the process of creating blank slides.

This will require you to save your PowerPoint presentation differently than you normally save. Please follow the directions for saving in Step 2 below carefully.

Step 1: Open PowerPoint and Create Blank Slides

The first step is to open PowerPoint and create blank slides.  You may want to save white and black and perhaps some additional colors that accent your story. To create a colored slide, click on Format and then click on Background.

The Background dialogue box will open so that you can select a background color.

Click on the drop down box to select a color.  You will be given a choice of fill colors or you can click on More Colors for additional colors. Select your color choice by highlighting it and clicking on Apply. You do not want to click on apply to All because then all the slides will be the same color.

Note:  You only need one slide of each color since you can just keep importing the same slide if you need more than one for your photo story.

Keep adding slides with different colors until you have all the different ones that you want. If you are going to be using Photo Story frequently, I recommend that you save a variety of slides with different background colors so that they will always be available when you want to use them.

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Step 2: Saving as a jpg

Next you need to save the slides as jpgs. It is important that you complete this task or you will not be able to import the slides into Photo Story 3.

First, go to the menu bar and select Save.

Your Save As window will open and you will see that the default save is for a PowerPoint presentation. You must change this from *.ppt to *.jpg. See the box below.

Change the File name to something you will be able to remember. I changed my presentation to blank_slides.

IMPORTANT STEP: Click on the dropdown menu for Save as type. Now scroll down until you get to JPEG File Interchange Format (*.jpg). Click on that and then click Save.

A window will appear that asks if you want to save every slide or just the one you are working on. If you have more than one slide, click on Every Slide. (If you just have one slide then you can click on Current Slide Only. This option is handy if you decide to go back and create another slide for your presentation.)

Next, a box will appear that tells you where you slides have been saved. In most cases, PowerPoint will save your files to My Documents. Notice that PowerPoint has created a separate file folder for your slides.

Your slides will create a folder with the same name as your file. Within the folder, your slides will be labeled as Slide1,jpg, Slide2.jpg, etc. These are the files that can be imported into Photo Story 3.

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Power Bytes are tutorials provided for the MTT program at University of Texas at Brownsville.
© 2007 Janice Wilson Butler


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.