Here’s the situation: You have the perfect picture for your presentation, however you want to get rid of some of the excess borders around it to better fit your slide. How is this accomplished? To do this, you would use a process called Cropping. In this case, Cropping can be defined as taking the original image and eliminating certain parts of it. This process can be a bit of a pain, especially if you don’t have an image manipulation program such as Adobe Photoshop. Luckily, Microsoft PowerPoint has its own picture cropping utility that is both simple to use and effective.

To begin, insert your image into your slide. Next, right-click on your image and select Show Picture Toolbar from the resulting pop-up menu. This toolbar is shown below:

As you can see, the Crop tool is highlighted in the above screenshot. This is what you will be using to modify your image.

Click on the Crop tool to select it. Your image will now have sizing handles, like my image below:

To crop the image, simply move the sizing handles. If you accidentally crop too much, don’t worry. If you drag the sizing handles back out, the cropped part of your image will be restored.

There you have it! Not only is it easy, but it saves you a truckload of time as well (since you can do inline cropping as opposed to having to use another tool).