The easiest way to handle this is to put your pictures in a folder, then
click Insert | Picture | New Photo Album. (You may have to click the
down-button on the menu to find the photo album button.) In the ensuing
dialog, select all the photos in the folder, make a couple of other settings,
then click go. It will grind away and in a few seconds you'll have all the
photos in as slides.
That was the easy part.
Then for formatting, you need to delete the first slide (or change the
title), and set the background color black (it defaults to white - yuck) - or
apply a style. Then open Transitions and select a transition (fade
smoothly), enter a slide duration time (3 seconds or so), and click "apply to
all slides. Then you're ready to go. Start the slide show, roll a CD and
you have a poor-man's Picture and Music show.
If you want to try to time it so the slides end when the song ends, that
takes math. Take the length of the song in seconds, divide it by the number
of slides, and enter the resulting time per slide in the slide transition
duration box. If you use a fade or other transition, however, PowerPoint
stops the clock during the transition, so you need to subtract the length of
the transition. (i.e. if the song is 3 minutes long and you have 50 slides,
that's 180 seconds/50 = 3.6 seconds. With a 1 second transition, set the
transition to 2.6 seconds.)
All this is complicated by the fact that transitions are processor-speed
dependent, so if you move to another computer that has a slower processor, 1
second transition may be 1.3 seconds, and over 50 slides that will screw up
timing.
Bottom line, unless you have a lot of time to play with this, set your slide
duration so that the show will end before the song is over, then just fade
the music out.
If you want to try to sync the slides to the music - so the slides flip on
the beat or sync up with lyric, that's way beyond a first-timer's skill set.
I could write a book about it - and in fact I'm planning to.
SteveP
