Working with graphics in PowerPoint doesn’t have to be frustrating or time consuming. This ebook walks through quick and easy tricks to make your presentations more polished and engaging.

From the ebook:

Forcing a picture to fit the space you’ve allotted on a slide can be harder than finding the right picture! Whether you’re stretching it or shrinking it, problems are inherent—problems you can’t always fix. When that happens, you have to get a bit creative. In this article, I’ll show you how two basic skills—resizing and cropping—can help you get that picture in the required space. You’ll seldom end up with the picture you started with in your head, but that’s okay.

First, I’ll show you the basics: how to resize and crop a picture. Then, I’ll show you how to use those basic skills to solve problems when photos don’t fit the space. You’ll need no other specialized skills. You might not learn any new skills if you’re already familiar with resizing and cropping, but you might look at these skills differently—easy is always better.

Resize and crop
Figure A shows a picture inserted via the Insert tab (choose the Pictures option in the Images group). It’s where a lot of us start. To the right, you can see 365 design features at work. If you find one you like, just click it and be done.

Resizing is simple: With the picture selected, click any of the resize handles—those white circles along the borders and in each corner—as shown in Figure B. When the double-arrow pointer appears, hold down the mouse button and drag the handle. Doing so makes the picture larger or smaller. Use a corner to maintain aspect ratio; the border handles will distort the image by stretching or shrinking it, but sometimes that’s what you’ll want.