Depending on the topic of your talk and your audience, you may want to add smaller images to selected slides, or create an entire slide with only an illustration or photograph.

You need to make sure that you have space on a slide for the image or illustration. Slide 4 on "What is a grid?" is a good example of a slide where an illustration of a grid would be useful. However, there is no space on this slide, so if you were really giving this talk, you would add one or more slides after Slide 4 with illustrations of grids.

Clipart is easy to acquire and some are included with the Corel CD. The Corel Office Installation CD Master also has some photographs. You will have to decide on how appropriate images are for your presentation. Particularly if images support or further explain ideas, they are good to use.

Yet another type of image that may need to be added is an organizational logo. For example, a logo could be added on the title slide.

Brief Comments on the Types of Images

Although it may not be important to know much about images when placing them in a word processing document, you do need to be aware of two types of images as you use them in slide shows with a color background.

There are two broad categories of images: bitmapped (or raster) and vector. Bitmapped images are made up of pixels (or dots) creating the image and are commonly produced when scanning drawings or photographs. They can also be created with a paint program, like the one that ships with Windows 95. Vector images store each image as a series of instructions on how to draw the object; in essence, they are created by combining many small shapes to make the image.

If you have a bitmapped flower image, and place the image on a slide with a color background, the "background" part of the image (which is probably white) is part of the image, and covers up the slide's background. If you have a vector flower image, and place the image on a slide, there is no background (in most cases) to cover up the slide's background. Clipart that ship with Corel are vector images, as are the clipart images from Microsoft's Office collection. You can purchase both types of images, so consider the image format when buying clipart.

Placing the Image

No matter what type of image you are using, a clipart image, a photo image purchased in a collection, an image coming from a scanner, etc., the procedure for inserting the image is similar. You should be in Slide Editor View  looking at the slide where you want to place the image. Click on INSERT on the menu bar, and pick Graphics, Clipart. The Scrapbook will appear. Click and drag a clipart image from the scrapbook into your slide window.

The "Scrapbook" dialog box appears with two Tabs. Presentations will initially be looking at the Corel graphics folder for your machine, which is probably: C:\COREL\SUITE8\GRAPHICS\CLIPART. On a "normal" installation only a small number of the Clipart images are installed on your hard drive. You can use any of these images, or you can click the ACD Clipart@ Tab to change to the clipart images stored on the CD ROM. Be sure your Corel Suite 8 CD is in the CD drive before clicking the ACD Clipart@ Tab. Use Insert, Graphics, from File to retrieve other images you have in collections you have purchased or scanned.

The image will be placed on the slide and the image will have handles around it (eight dots around the outside of the image area).

Dragging on a handle changes the size and shape of the image.

Dragging the entire image will move it to another location.

Exercise 5

Move to the "Clipart" slide. Use the Slide Editor View. Click on INSERT on the menu bar, then Graphics, Clipart. When the Scrapbook dialog box appears, make sure the Corel Suite 8 CD is in the CD drive and click the CD Clipart Tab. Double click the flowers folder and look for the file named ORCHID. Drag and Drop the orchid image into your slide. Close the scrapbook dialog box.

This is a clipart image of a orchid plant. Practice making the image larger and smaller, by dragging on a corner handle. Move the entire image to the right side of the slide by clicking and dragging anywhere within the box area (but not on a handle). Use the same steps to place another image, WATRCAN2 next to the first image. The file is located in the tools, garden folder on the CD. Be sure to click the go back one level button in the scrapbook to get back to the top of the folder list. This image shows a water can with water pouring from it. Both of these images are vector images.

Save your revised slide set.

Inverting and Rotating an Image

As you place images, you may want to invert them (top to bottom, or left to right) and sometimes rotate them. The water can image is facing left on the slide which is not good design. Make sure the [Selection Tool] is activated on the Tool Bar, and select the image by clicking once on it. Click on GRAPHICS on the Property Bar, and pick Flip, then Left/Right. You can select this option again to flip it back. Some images have a top and bottom and could also be flipped top/bottom.

To rotate an image, select the image so it has handles around it, and right click on the image.Pick the option of Rotate from the QuickMenu, and then drag one of the handles.

Exercise 6

Click once on the water can image inserted in Exercise 5. Select GRAPHICS from the Property Bar, Flip, then Left/Right. Save this version of "newsletter tips."

Click once on the water can and right-click to pick Rotate from its QuickMenu. Drag one of the handles to rotate the image.

Save this version of "newsletter tips."

Editing Images

This introductory class will not cover creating original art drawings, but you may find it useful to edit purchased clipart. To edit an image, select it and right-click on the image. In the resulting QuickMenu, pick the option of Edit Group (if it is a vector image) or Edit Bitmap (if it is a bitmapped image). A thick line appears around the image. If it is a vector image, you can delete parts of the image to create a new one. If it is a bitmapped image, you can also make changes. Sometimes it is easy to edit images and sometimes not, depending on the complexity of the image and how it was created. There will be an exercise later, on editing a vector image, if you want to try this feature.

Using Images from the Corel CD

A standard installation of Presentation only puts a small number of graphics and clipart images on your hard drive. If you have access to the Corel Suite8 Installation CD Master, you can pull off other images from the CD. There are over 10,000 images on the CD-ROM.. There is a PHOTOS folder at the main level on the CD, as well as a COREL folder. Besides using the PHOTOS folder, you can open up COREL, then SUITE8, then GRAPHICS and you will find folders for CLIPART, and PICTURES (as well as BACKGRNDS, BORDERS, and TEXTURES).

Learning Corel Presentations 8.0