Everybody likes to add pictures to their documents (sometimes to their detriment, but that’s a different article). However, the file sizes on these pictures can add up, and before you know it your 10 page document is 10 MB (megabytes). This causes problems not only for you, but for your audience as well. One example of this occurs with emailing the documents. Many times documents are emailed to their intended audience. Unfortunately, a document of that size could cause problems with their email systems.

Does this mean that you can never add pictures to your documents? Of course not. However, you should look to Compress your pictures to reduce the overall size of your document. To Compress a picture basically means that you are reducing the file size of the picture by changing various attributes of the picture. Most of the time this means that the picture quality is reduced (lower resolution) or the color scheme is changed slightly (lower set of colors used). It’s not as bad as it sounds though, as these changes are usually not that noticeable to the human eye (unless you drastically change image formats).

How do you go about compressing your pictures? You can use a number of image manipulating tools that are available out there (such as Adobe Photoshop), however I am specifically going to talk about how to use the native compression available in Microsoft Word.

Let’s assume that you have already placed your picture into your Word document. The first thing you’ll want to do is bring up the Picture Toolbar. This can be accomplished by right-clicking on your picture and selecting Show Picture Toolbar. The Picture Toolbar will then appear as shown below:

The tool that we will be using is highlighted with the red circle in the picture above. It is called the Compress Pictures tool. Click on it, and the following dialog box will appear:

Each section of the dialog has been assigned a number in the picture above. Let’s start with first one.

Section 1 - Apply To

In this section, you can decide whether you want to apply your compression choice to either all of the pictures in the document or only the one that you have currently selected. Choose whichever one is appropriate.

Section 2 - Change Resolution

This is where you will actually be setting your compression. The default should be set to Print. To compress, select Web/Screen. You should see the resolution number on the right decrease significantly. For our purposes, we won’t be using the No Change option.

Section 3 - Options

The default setting in this section should have both checkboxes enabled. The first checkbox states that you want to compress your selections. The second checkbox will delete any of the areas of your pictures that may have been cropped. Normally you wouldn’t need to changes these settings. However, if you want to just delete the cropped areas from your pictures and not change the resolution (i.e. don’t compress them), then in Section 2 you could select No Change and de-select the compress checkbox in this section.

This is a pretty simple process that can really cut down on the size of your documents. I recommend that you try this if you find that your document is large and you have a lot of pictures in it. You should definitely see a noticeable difference in the document size.