Office 2007 and Office 2010 has tools to edit photos and pictures in your document.
Office 2007 and Office 2010 has tools to edit photos and pictures in your document.
In olden days (ie 10 years ago) to put an image into a document you had to carefully edit the image file, resize it etc then insert it into your Word, Excel or PowerPoint document.
Over time, Office has grown a set of image editing tools that work inside the document. All you have to do it insert an image into Word, Excel or PowerPoint then adjust it to suit your needs.
This isn’t just a matter of convenience. The image in a document is usually a copy of the image file (unless you’ve linked to an external file instead of importing). Changes to the image in the document should make no difference to the original image saved elsewhere. You can adjust the document version of the image leaving the original (probably at a higher resolution) safely separate.
For many years Office (at least Office 2003, XP and 2000) has had a limited set of image adjustment options on the Picture toolbar. This toolbar let you crop, adjust brightness and contrast etc. This limited toolbar view made these tools hard to use.
In this article we’ll look at some of the more common picture editing features, most of which have been available, in some form, for many versions of Office.
Office 2007 introduced the ribbon which I know isn’t always the most popular thing in the world but for picture editing made features a lot easier to see and use.
Instead of the picture toolbar showing up all the time, the Picture tab only appears when you select an image.
Live Preview
The big improvement is live preview, as you hover over possible changes in an image, those changes are temporarily shown in the document. You can see the effect of that image editing feature has in the document itself. No more switching back and forth to test settings.
Crop
Probably the most common image edit is cropping – removing select edges of the images to show only part of the original.
Despite being a commonly used feature, it’s somewhat hidden on the right side of the ribbon in the ‘Size’ section which is reduced to a single button in narrower views.
You can change the image to a specific height/width or click on the arrow icon on bottom right to see the picture size dialog that’s been around for many versions of Office.
Selecting an image will activate ‘handles’ at points around the image. The corner handles can be dragged to resize the image, larger or smaller keeping the image size in its original proportions. The handles on the sides will adjust the height or width but aren’t commonly used because they change the height/width ratio of the image and make it look distorted.
Clicking on ‘Crop’ activates the crop handles around the image.
Use the black bars to drag the image edges to show what you want. If you make a mistake, the standard Ctrl + Z undo shortcut will revert the image to its uncropped form.
Wrap Text
Positioning an image among text is relatively simple these days (I say that as a veteran of Word v1 for Windows).
The default is ‘inline’ like this:
But the chances are you’ll want to position the image on the left or right then wrap the text around the image. The Position gallery options in Word 2007/2010 let you position the image at the various places relative to the page. These options will also turn text wrapping on.
To wrap the text only, click on the Text Wrapping button – most likely you’ll choose ‘Square’ or ‘Tight’ (the latter has a smaller gap between the image and text – it’s useful if you’re trying to fit more onto a page).
Once wrapping is on you can easily drag the photo to the location you want on the page. Word will work out if the text should wrap on the left, right or both sides of the image.
‘Edit Wrap points’ can be used to control the boundary between image and text. It’s most commonly used after rotating an image. The black points can be dragged around to change how the text flows. These days Office is much better at selecting acceptable wrap points even for partially rotated images so this feature isn’t needed a lot. In this example we’re showing deliberately extreme wrap points to demonstrate the effect more clearly.
For more accurate text wrapping and position control, choose the ‘More Layout Options’ at the bottom of the Text Wrapping menu.
Rotate
If the photo was taken with the camera at an angle you might need to rotate the image. That’s easily done from the small rotate button on the bottom right of the Arrange ribbon section.
Or click on the image then the round green handle lets you rotate the image.
Compress image
Back in the day, the size of a document was a major concern. Larger documents were hard to transport and if they got too large Office could not open them!
These days document size isn’t as big a concern (sorry). The OpenXML formats (.docx .xlsx etc) compress the overall document automatically while transporting a document even as large as 10MB isn’t the hassle it would have been a few years ago.
Images in a document can make up a large proportion of the document file size. For that reason Microsoft has a ‘Compress Image’ option to reduce the resolution of an image to a level needed for printing or screen display.
The problem with ‘Compress Image’ is that you lose the ability to effectively edit an image. If you want to increase the size of a compressed image you might start to get ‘pixilation’ from a compressed image.
Unless you need to, we suggest not compressing images in Office documents. Better to leave them in their original resolution in case you need it.
There is a lot more available in Picture editing, make a test document with some text and a few images. Then try the features for yourself.
See Also
- Simple image overlays in Word
- Image Correction in Office 2010
- Background Removal Tool in Office 2010
- Hash # web link problem in Word
- Outlook 2010 – Save As Picture
- Screen Clipping in Office 2010
- How to copy a picture from an Outlook email
- How to reduce the size of a photo for email
- Sharing pictures on your website
- Office does photo management
- Pictures in PowerPoint 2003
- Outlook picture viewer
- Office Document Imaging – Part 1
- Sending pictures by email
