Power Cropping Images in PowerPoint

Step #4. Ungroup your layout twice and remove the extra pieces

Once you have your SmartArt layout, hit Ctrl + Shift + G on your keyboard twice to ungroup the graphic and break it down to the pictures, shapes and/or textboxes.

Delete all of the shapes you do not want to keep in your layout. In the picture above, that means deleting all the semi-transparent text boxes from the Bending Picture Semi-Transparent Text layout.

Step #5. Adjust your photo’s X and Y crop offsets (if necessary)

For any image that appears cut off or not quite centered correctly within the shape that PowerPoint cropped it down to, you can adjust it by following these steps:

1. Right-click your image
2. Select Format Picture
3. Click the Picture icon
4. Adjust the Offset X and/or Offset Y values

Offset X moves your picture horizontally within the cropped frame while Offset Y moves your picture vertically within the cropped frame.

Step #6. Change your picture shape (optional)

Once you have broken your SmartArt graphic apart and adjusted your images, you can change the shape of your images as follows:

1. Select your pictures
2. Go to the Shape Format tab
3. Click on Edit Shape
4. Select Change Shape
5. Choose the Oval shape (or whichever shape you prefer)

You can convert multiple pictures at the same time to another PowerPoint shape. You do not need to do this one picture at a time.

Picture Hack Conclusion

While there are many shortcuts for manipulating and cropping pictures in PowerPoint, there is no way to do so for multiple slides at a time. That’s where figuring out how to leverage special tools and hacks in the software comes in handy.

Being able to Power Crop 56 photos into a standardize size and shape is always going to be faster than using your keyboard shortcuts to manually crop and resize your images one-by-one.

In the next article, we will dive into your Hold Shortcuts and I’ll teach you a clever mechanic to learn them a lot faster than everyone else.

Up Next …

In the next lesson I’ll show you some PowerPoint HOLD Shortcuts … with a twist!

By Taylor Croonquist

I’ve had millions of dollars of funding riding on PowerPoint pitch books and proposals that needed to be perfect, and I was sick of working on them until 3AM in the morning only to have a boss or client decide to change 90% of it when they reviewed it the next morning. So I geeked out on PowerPoint: I joined groups, bought books, went to conferences and worked backwards through everything I thought I knew. I took the most time intensive tasks that waste your time and figured out how to get PowerPoint to do them for you. After more than a decade of pursuing PowerPoint proficiency, I’m excited to teach it to you!