Add Picture Fills to Shapes in PowerPoint 2007 for Windows

This entire series explores about fills for shapes in PowerPoint 2007, these fills include solid, picture, gradient, and texture. In a previous tutorial, we covered solid fills for shapes. In this tutorial, we'll learn about Picture Fills. If you need pictures to use as fills for this tutorial, you can get free pictures from the listing on our Free Images page, or you can buy high quality pictures from our Indezine Photos section.

Scroll down this page to see a sample presentation that contains shapes with Picture Fills.

Follow these steps to change or apply a Picture Fill to a shape:

1. Select the shape that you want to change the fill for. Alternatively, if you just want to follow this tutorial step-by-step, launch PowerPoint. Most of the time, PowerPoint will open with a new slide in a presentation, PowerPoint 2007 users can change the slide layout to Blank by selecting Home tab | Layout | Blank.
2. Under the Home or Insert tab of the Ribbon, click the Shapes button to view the Shapes gallery that you can see in Figure 1. Select the rectangle (or any other shape), and then either drag and draw, or click once on the blank slide to place an instance of the shape.
3. 
   Figure 1: Shapes gallery
3. Select the shape so that the Ribbon area now shows the Drawing Tools Format, as shown in Figure 2. Activate this Ribbon tab.
4. 
   Figure 2: Drawing Tools Format tab of the Ribbon
Note: The Drawing Tools Format tab is a Contextual tab, These tabs are special tabs in the Ribbon that are not visible all the time. They only make an appearance when you are working with a particular slide object which can be edited using special options.
4. From the Drawing Tools Format tab, locate the Shape Styles group, then select the Shape Fill option to view the Shape Fill drop-down gallery that you can see in Figure 3.
5. 
   Figure 3: Shape Fill gallery
5. From the Shape Fill drop-down gallery, choose the Picture option (refer to Figure 3).
6. This opens Insert Picture dialog box as shown in Figure 4. Navigate to where you have saved pictures to be used as fills, select a picture, and click the Insert button.
7. 
   Figure 4: Insert Picture dialog box
7. This inserts the picture as a fill for the selected shape.
8. Remember to save your presentation often.
Related Link: My book Cutting Edge PowerPoint 2007 For Dummies covers many aspects of PowerPoint 2007. A free chapter excerpt PowerPointing with the Best of Them is available on this site.