Auto-crop transparent padding of pictures in PowerPoint

Imagine one of your PowerPoint slides has some pictures that have some transparent padding around them. Here is an example:



Sometimes such padding can get in the way, for example, if you want to align these pictures using PowerPoint's align feature. That is, the feature will align these pictures based on the actual boundaries of the pictures, not the boundary of the visible parts. The result will not look aligned at all. The solution is to get rid of the extra padding, so that they look like this:



Of course you can achieve the above by using PowerPoint's crop feature to carefully crop until all the extra padding is gone. Alternatively, you can achieve the same more easily and more precisely (and with just one click) using CropLab's Crop Out Padding feature (CropLab is a part of the free add-in PowerPointLabs).



Some other things CropLab can do are given below.
1. Crop a picture to match shapes:

   

2. Crop parts that are outside the slide:



3. Crop to match the size of another picture:



4. Crop pictures to match a given aspect ratio (so that they can be resized to the same size):



Learn more about the CropLab here. PowerPointLabs is a free PowerPoint Add-in developed at NUS School of Computing. You can download it from https://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~pptlabs/

Create a 'Frosted Glass' effect in your PowerPoint slides using PowerPointLabs

'Blur Selected' feature of the Effects Lab (one of the Labs included in PowerPointLabs) can be used to create a frosted glass effect by adding a blur effect to the selected area. 



To use the feature, first draw a shape over the area to be blurred, select the shape, like so.


Then select Blur Selected from the Effects dropdown menu and choose the blurriness level to use.

This feature is especially useful when you want to show some text to appear over a picture background without the details of the picture interfering with the readability of the text. Here are some examples:

 https://pxhere.com/en/photo/567004 

PowerPointLabs is a free PowerPoint Add-in developed at NUS School of Computing. You can download it from https://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~pptlabs/

Picture credits:

• https://pxhere.com/en/photo/567004
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tea_plants.jpg
• https://www.pexels.com/photo/stripes-insects-macro-golden-57398/
• https://pixnio.com/nature-landscapes/meadows/grass-meadow-wood-nature-sun

Add a visual timer to a PowerPoint slide using the TimerLab

You can add animated timers onto your slide show using PowerPointLab's Timer Lab feature, like this example below.

As generated timers consist of normal PowerPoint objects, you can tweak their appearance as you wish. Here are two examples:

To see a slide deck containing an example of a timer, click here. 

PowerPointLabs is a free PowerPoint Add-in developed at NUS School of Computing. You can download it from https://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~pptlabs/