Crop Pictures in Office 2013 on a Touch Device

While creating PowerPoint slides, you will invariably add pictures -- and of course you can also add pictures in Word documents or Excel sheets. If you are using any of these programs on a touch device such as Microsoft Surface, this process works just like how you would insert pictures on a desktop version of PowerPoint 2013. The differences between working within a desktop and a touch environment become a little more pronounced when you want to do something simple with your pictures -- like cropping them. Yes, cropping can make your picture more pertinent by removing areas that may be not required. In this tutorial, we'll show you how you can crop a picture within PowerPoint 2013 on a touch device such as Surface -- the process works in the same way on Word and Excel versions of Office 2013:

1. Tap the selected picture on your slide and you will see a floatie spawning right there -- in this case you see the Picture floatie that provides formatting options for the tapped picture. Tap on the Crop button, which is the rightmost button on this floatie, as shown in Figure 1.
   
   
   Figure 1: Crop button within the Picture floatie
   
   
2. This takes you to Crop mode and dark crop handles appear on the edge of the picture, as shown in Figure 2. Note that there are four corner crop handles (highlighted in red). Also there are four side crop handles (highlighted in blue).
   
   
   Figure 2: Crop handles on the edge of the picture
   
   
3. Now, carefully drag any of the corner handles inwards -- for this tutorial we dragged the top right handle, as shown in Figure 3.
   
   Figure 3: Drag corner crop handle inwards
   
   
4. Keep dragging so that the focus is on an important part of your picture. In Figure 4, below -- you will notice that dragging a corner handle inwards affects two sides of your picture.
   
   
   Figure 4: Cropping using corner crop handle
   
   
5. You can also drag a side handle inwards. In Figure 5, below you can see the right side crop handle is tapped for dragging.
   
   
   Figure 5: Drag side crop handle inwards
   
   
6. Keep dragging so that you focus on an important part of your picture. In Figure 6, below you can notice that dragging the side crop handle inwards affects only one side of picture.
   
   
   Figure 6: Cropping using side crop handle
   
   
7. You can also move the picture within the crop area to show more important areas of the picture. To do that, tap and hold your finger right in the middle of the crop area, as shown in Figure 7.
   
   
   Figure 7: Tap in the middle of placeholder to move the crop area
   
   
8. Now, drag the crop area -- once the required area is in place, stop dragging. This will reposition the crop area, as shown in Figure 8.
   
   
   Figure 8: Crop area repositioned
   
   
9. Finally, tap once on an empty area of the slide for the actual crop to happen. Figure 9, below shows the final cropped picture.
   
   
   Figure 9: Cropped picture

More Crop options can be found within the Picture Tools Format contextual tab of the Ribbon. Tap on the down-arrow of the Crop button, as shown in Figure 10.


Figure 10: Crop options within the Picture Tools Format contextual tab

This brings up the Crop drop-down gallery, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 11.


Figure 11: Crop drop-down gallery

The options within the Crop drop-down gallery are explained in our Crop Pictures in PowerPoint 2013 tutorial. Do be aware though that these extra options are not Touch aware -- they work in the same way as they would within a non-Touch environment.