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One of the many problems with images and their storage in Microsoft Office documents (Word, Excel and PowerPoint), is the lack of understanding of how this data is stored and the impact that this can have on the disk space used to store the document.
For instance imagine we import a picture into word which is approximately 1 Megabyte in size on disk and 2514 x 1686 pixels in size on screen.
As an example, we'll import the picture below into a Word document. The image is 4.13 MB in size with a resolution of 3801 x 4978 pixels.
Word will automatically resize the image to fit the margins of the document but the image data remains unaltered.
To confirm this, right-Right click on the image and select 'Format Picture', then selecting the size tab will reveal that this has already been reduced in size on screen to 22% Picture > Size to show that Word has reduced the image to 12% of its original size.
However when this word document is saved, you will see that the files is still over 1 Megabyte in size.
Microsoft Office has a system to compress images built into it. You should notice that when you select the image on screen a new Ribbon option appears labelled Picture Tools – Format
With the image selected click the Compress icon button shown below:
Clicking this button should bring up the following screen:
Now, depending on what the purpose of the document is, you can select the Print option for a print document or the Web/Screen option if you are doing a PowerPoint presentation.
If you have more than one image in the document you can use this tool to compress them all by selecting the ‘All pictures in document’ radio button. Also if you have used the crop tool, leaving the “Delete cropped areas of pictures” ticked will discard the portions of the image not displayed.
Using our example if we compress the map for print reduces the save document to 20% of its original size, in this case a saving of 800 Kilobytes, and selecting the compress for Web/Screen reduces the file to 67 Kilobytes (nearly one twentieth of the original size) without reducing the quality noticeably.
Because of this, the saved Word document in our example is over 4.2 MB.
Left-click the imported image and select Picture Tools > Format > Compress Pictures from the top menu.
In the Compress Pictures dialog box, select either 'Selected pictures' or 'All pictures in document', then OK > Apply.
Confirm the change by right-clicking on the image and selecting Picture > Size. A height and width of 100% means the image has been successfully compressed.
With a compressed image, the saved Word document is under 400 KB.
This feature is also available in Excel and PowerPointThe same process works in PowerPoint and Excel.
