It can sometimes be challenging to find visually engaging images for presentations and all too many times I see speakers use really awful images or clip-art which detracts from their content no matter how good their presentation is.
Over the years I have created and in some cases purchased images to use in my presentations from webinars to live streams and live events. However it is not always easy to find an image to illustrate what you are talking about.
If you are a business with products it is ideally best to have lifestyle photos that you have created showing your products in use rather than catalogue shots or images from the manufacturer.
If you really get stuck you could access images from a site where you can download royalty free images (do check the licence to ensure that you can use them commercially or for any restrictions on use) and a popular site for this is Pixabay.
Last year I wrote about how you can access Pixabay images on your mobile device. Now they have released two other integrations – one for Adobe Photoshop and one for Microsoft Office.
The add-in supports the following Office apps: PowerPoint 2013 SP1+, PowerPoint 2016+, PowerPoint 2016 for Mac, PowerPoint Online, Word 2013 SP1+, Word 2016+, Word 2016 for Mac, Word Online.
All images on Pixabay are released under Creative Commons CC0, which makes them safe to use without asking for permission or giving credit to the artist – even for commercial purposes. However, it is still your responsibility, to make sure the depicted content (persons, logos, private property, etc.) is suitable for your application and does not infringe any rights.
Below you will see how easy it is now to be able to search for images to use in your PowerPoint presentations. If you prefer to watch a video tutorial you can watch on Facebook here or on YouTube here.
Using the Pixabay Images add-in, you can search the Pixabay database without ever leaving Word or PowerPoint and insert any image you like with one click.
This means you no longer have to download images from Pixabay to your hard drive and re-upload them into your documents.
You can find the Pixabay app on the Microsoft Appsource site here.
You will need to log into your Microsoft account (for me that is my Office 365 account) to enable the Pixabay Microsoft Add-in and you can then open the app within PowerPoint or Word.
You will then need to enable editing on your PowerPoint presentation and click to accept that you trust the add-in.
To be able to access the Pixabay database within PowerPoint you need to:
1 – click Insert in the top navigation bar of your PowerPoint presentation
2 – click on the Pixabay images icon on the top righ of your PowerPoint presentation.
There is a default search set up when you acces Pixabay Images but you can then type in your key words to search for images that you want to add to your presentation.
There are advanced filters for search though I found when testing the feature that they did not save – features include searching for only images and searching for images of specific size.
This is a really helpful option from Pixabay if you want to add royalty free images to your presentations.
It would be great to have an option of bookmarking or favouriting images that we want to use in the future and also to have a transparent png search option if you want to overlay an image on your presentation – let’s hope the Pixabay Microsoft Office Add-in will be developed further in the months ahead.
Remember that Pixabay is a FREE site to use and the Microsoft Office Add-in is also free to use – so why not give it a try to enhance your next presentation, video or even live stream?
If you would like to watch a video tutorial about the Pixabay Office Add-in you can find it here on YouTube or watch the video at the bottom of the article.
If you have questions about improving the effectiveness of your visual marketing, you can schedule a conversation with me here.
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