When we hear the term Spam, the first thing that comes to mind is all those unrequested, unopened, unanswered emails that sit in our Outlook folder waiting to be processed (via the trash bin). It's certain that only the minority of us think of Spam as the Hormel Goods trademarked pork product.

But even before its place in our junk email files, the name Spam had been generic when referring to all brands of canned smoked ham and pork, instead of just the original brand. A trademark is recognised as being generic when the brand name has become a generic description for a product or service and is no longer specific to the trademark. If the brand is particularly successful, it can be adopted as a noun or verb that will be used in our everyday tasks. Think of Kleenex, aspirin and Hoover.

One of the most obvious examples of this successful transition is Google. The brand has been genericized and is now used as a common verb meaning to search the internet. And just as Google is, as it's known in the linguistic world, a proprietary eponym, "photoshopping" is now used as a generic term associated with most picture editing tasks. As the photo editing software approaches its twentieth birthday, it seems that more and more new terms are being born out of the digital revolution.

The popularity of digital cameras has meant that we are all much more clued up. We are no longer only interested in taking the pictures, we are also involved in editing and sharing them, too. Social networking sites have contributed to this quest for knowledge and most cameras come with pre-programmed editing suites and functions. Even our mobile phones have apps which allow us to tweak and twitter (another brand soon, perhaps, to be made generic).

But there's no need to worry about how your images will look when you use Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007. And you don't need to learn how to use a complicated software program in order to make the most of your images when you use PowerPoint.

Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 comes with a sophisticated array of picture tools to enable you to enhance any images to a professional standard. You can crop or tidy up a picture without having to sign up to a website in order to download a program or buy expensive software.

PowerPoint 2007 has an array of Office 2007 tools including the ribbon, new charting and graphic effects; and the PowerPoint 2007 Slide Master plus Multiple Layouts model gives us the ability to add our own custom layouts, which is fantastic.

There's a host of colour editing tools including a new way to recolour pictures and clip art with the new Recolor feature. To use the Recolor feature, simply select the picture that you want to recolour, then in Picture Tools, click the Format tab. In the Adjust group, click Recolor. Move the pointer over the Recolor selections to preview the selection on the picture. Now click the Recolor selection to apply that selection to the picture.

Previously, in earlier versions of Microsoft Office, the Recolor picture feature was available only in Microsoft PowerPoint. The new Recolor feature now comes as standard in the three primary 2007 Office programs.

By using the Recolor feature, you can perform the following tasks: Recolor a picture to grayscale or recolour a picture with a sepia tone; lighten the picture and change it to a watermark-style graphic; recolour a picture to a high-contrast black-and-white picture; recolour a picture by using one of seven Dark Variations tints, or seven Light Variations tints; recolour a picture by using a custom colour of your choice; and use the "Set Transparent" tool to select a colour to be made transparent in a picture.