Know-How Screencast - Add and Manage Cut-outs in PowerPoint

Here is a three-minute video demonstrating the steps to adding, managing, and manipulating Common Craft Cut-outs in Powerpoint. This is part of our “Know-How” resources.

Find all know-how resources. 

Video Transcript:

Hi. This is Lee LeFever with another Common Craft Screencast.  Today, we're going to take a look at downloading Common Craft Cut-outs, and managing them in Powerpoint.

We'll start by logging in to the Common Craft website, which brings us to the member dashboard. From here, we'll click Cut-out Library at the top to start browsing Cut-outs. Once we find the image set we want, we'll click Download, and a box will appear with the options. After clicking this box, the options for downloading a Powerpoint or ZIP file will appear. We'll select the ZIP option and save it to our computer.

Now that we have it saved, we can double-click the ZIP file to open the folder inside. Then, by double-clicking the folder, we can reveal the Cut-outs ready for your project. Let's open Powerpoint and the Cut-outs folder at the same time.

The simplest way to add Cut-outs to Powerpoint is to simply drag and drop the images right onto the slide. You can also add Cut-outs by clicking Insert on the toolbar and then Picture to find the Cut-outs saved on your computer. Now that we've added a Cut-out, let's see what we can do with it.

By clicking it, you'll see lines and dots appear around it. By clicking and dragging a corner dot, we can change the size of the image. By dragging the dots in the middle, we can change the width or height, making it shorter or skinnier. And there's more, you can grab a dot on the side and drag it so that it flips the Cut-out over, changing its orientation. This means that every Cut-out has at least two sides. Also, images can be rotated. Click to select it, then click and drag the green dot to spin the Cut-out around.

Here you can see that I've added a second Cut-out to highlight working with multiple images. Common Craft Cut-outs are designed to be used together. And just like real paper, we need a way to manage which one is on top.

Here you can see that Carl is appearing behind the computer, and we want him in front instead. To do this, we'll select the Cut-outs, right click, and go to the Arrange option, and then select Bring to Front. This arranges the Cut-out in front of the computer.

Often, two or more Cut-outs appear together consistently and we want them to act as one. To do this, we'll group them. Simply select all the Cut-outs you want to group, and right-click. Then go to Grouping, and select Group to glue them together. Here you can see that they move and even resize as one image.

Learn more about Cut-outs and creating your own explanations at CommonCraft.com.