OT: Best Resolution Image File to Import into Word?

Why? You can compress them to the print DPI. Otherwise I would suggest the monitor resolution or at least half that. The other night I scanned in an old user manual with a tiny schematic. Scanner was set to 600dpi, the Component values were readable. 400 dpi coulld have worked too.

Cheers

File format? From other apps I can print out to various file formats. What file format best imports into a Word document? ...Jim Thompson

jpg, png or bmp, I never had much luck with other formats. Wish there was better support for pdf. EMF or WEMF sometimes works well.

Cheers

A photo taken with a modern high-megapixel cell phone camera using an app like PhotoScan that uses "oversampling" will probably do better job in 2018 than the occasionally-used 10 year old HP print/scan/fax boxes most people have sitting around

Jpeg seems to work fine for photos. I use Visio .EMF files for line work, like block diagrams. TIFFs are OK for diagrams too.

Define what you mean by "best". Quality vs size is always a trade off.

For line art PNG in as few colours as is needed is about the best and for photographs JPG at a quality you find acceptable. Choose unwisely and you will end up with a much larger file with no gain in quality.

I assume here that you do mean to truly import them rather than drag and drop them into a document where insane sizes can accumulate as orphaned metadata. It is particularly bad in standard reports where images get dragged and dropped onto the same locations.

Most document authoring tools re-compress the pic to fit the page you are pasting it into. Or the user rezises on the fly as he places it.

I've always had good luck with JPG's. The problem with Word is... the files get too big and tend to blow up.

Conventional wisdom is 150 dpi for very legible text, and 300 dpi for photo images. Screen resolution can hover around 96 dpi.

Beyond that advice, higher resolutions really only make sense in very specialized situations... for which one probably wouldn't choose Word in the first place!

Not to insult your intelligence, but I want to make sure you know the "trick" to working with images in Word:

Never (Never!!) use the page itself as the image container.

Instead, use a textbox or table cell (with borders turned off, if so desired). The image will generally be much better behaved, and with a textbox, you can re-arrange the image as needed (usually) without Windows blowing up.

I've had Word documents into the 150MB range with images. But use the page as an image container, it's often hard to get past about 25 before things get ugly.

Why not? I just drag/drop images into Word, and use the format option to resize them to look right. That works fine.

Of course, I don't import 20 megabyte images.

JPG is always wrong for line art, it's only for smooth-tone images. It produces ugly artefacts (fringing) unless you have high quality tools and know how to use them properly.

Use PNG for line art, or GIF if you absolutely must.

TIFF is well supported and can be used in either way, but it depends on what actual compression is enabled internally. If you don't know the details, it's better avoided.

BMP is always wrong, for every application. Just say no.

If you aren't producing work for print publication, 150dpi is almost always adequate - even for "print-at-home" stuff.

Clifford Heath.

Decide on the target printout size of the image. Then calculate for a minimum resolution of 300 ppi - 250 ppi in a pinch. Notice that it should be based on ppi (pixels per inch), not dpi. A lot of people confuse the two. PPI is the image resolution or pixel density; dpi is how many dots the printer uses to reproduce those pixels.

It is well established in photography circles that the eye cannot see the "jaggies" formed by a pixel-based image at 300 ppi or above. If the printout is to be, say, 4"x4", there's no benefit in making it more than 1200x1200 pixels.

Printing presses frown on jpg inserted into a word processor file for high-quality prints. PNG is a lossless compression format. So are TIFF and GIF but TIFF is less common nowadays and GIF is limited to 256 colours.

If you work with Word long enough, you'll come to see that big documents te nd to blow-up. Often spectacularly. It is my least favorite Microsoft Off ice product (well, maybe Visio), and it's the one that has (by far) the lar gest object model (programming). There are a lot of things that can, and o ften do, go wrong, and embedded image files is right up there near the top of "usual suspects".

The image(s) don't need to be large by themselves. Just the document.

But to your question, one benefit of using an image "container" is that you can more easily wrap text around it -- something that is quite a bit more cumbersome to do when both the page and the text are on the same page (cont ainer). Try it sometime and see if you don't agree! :)

Word doesn't do a good job on either of those. If you care about quality and size in the final document it is as well to match the image dimensions to the size it will display in Word at 100% zoom (+/-20%).

Word can be exceptionally bad if you paste large images into documents regularly by drag and drop. Regular inspection reports go haywire after a few months getting bigger and bigger every time they are updated.

I have seen 200MB corporate documents with less than 10MB of actual real data in them. The rest were previous images of one sort or another in the most awful BMP style orphaned metadata form. It used to be possible to automagically strip them by a VBA script but Mickeysoft broke it.

If you have an unreasonably sized document and want to see what utter dross is hiding inside it export to HTML will give you a rough idea.

These days I recommend people with insane sized Word documents for archive export them to PDF first since that effectively kills the dross. It isn't really possible to sort a Word document that has gone haywire (apart from possibly opening and saving it in a Word compatible clone).

Actually no it doesn't - it works fine the first time round only. If you drag and drop an image onto an existing image position both will get to survive internally and the file will grow bigger every time you do it.

It is an annoying problem with regularly updated documents like site inspection reports which after a while can end up many 100MB in size with at most 20MB of actual useful data inside them.

Unfortunately a lot of people do direct from a camera/smartphone and Word doesn't handle resizing to match the document requirements well.

Actually it is regular use of drag and drop onto existing images that makes it blow up. I used to have a VBA script to undo the damage that worked well until they launched Office 2007 when they managed to destroy the mechanism that I used to purge Word of its inner tapeworms.

Working on corporate documents with multiple versions of Word also causes orphaned metadata to build up faster than normal. Documents that originated in a previous version being particularly prone to it.

You can do it if you set the appropriate properties for the image.

The only thing is if you intend to export to HTML at some stage then it is much more likely to look approximately like what you intended if you put the images into a table. Word export to HTML is dire!

Although it is better than Powerpoint in this respect (which can't).

These usually don't last long in Word. Sooner or later, Word corrupts the document making it unusable (and helpfully copies the corruption when you think you can start a new document and copy-and-paste the old contents).

If you want professional, reliable word processing (and don't like LaTeX), LibreOffice is far, far better. You can open that 200 MB word document in LibreOffice, re-save it (as doc or docx if you want), and you'll get the 10 MB real file.

Word creates the crappiest, most bloated mess for HTML that you will ever see. It is even worse than the xml stuff it saves natively (which you can see by renaming your .docx file as .zip, and unpacking it).

Or use LibreOffice and generate PDF files directly - with greater efficiency, better rendering and more functionality than you get trying to extract them from Word.

Indeed (except that LibreOffice isn't a Word clone - it is a massive improvement).

Problem is that in a corporate environment the drones don't get a choice about which software they install or what bloatware they have to use for their intranet. I know a lot of pain and suffering caused by a recent supposedly "transparent" migration that broke loads of things.

If you keep your Word documents under 100MB they seldom implode. Above 250MB and implosion is almost inevitable.

I have a script that takes Words "filtered" HTML and turns it into something small concise and more or less oven ready for a proper HTML editor to make into a web page. I used to have a similar script for repairing Word documents but it stopped working in later versions.

(the script still ran but no longer had the beneficial effect)

Images have to be in a table for things to stay remotely right.

I love MS Office's - What you see is never quite what you get feature so that documents invariably depend on font metrics of the output device.

My favourite is that circles in Excel are rescaled in aspect ratio according to the kerning of the font you happen to use for default text!

Corporate drones don't have that choice. (or indeed any choice about what software is installed on their PC)

Absolutely true, at least in most cases. I work in a corporate environment, but not a huge one - and we don't have drones. People are allowed to say "I think /this/ program might be better". In the development department, people are /expected/ to use the best tools conveniently available - possibly asking IT for advice. Of course, it helps that the IT manager is flexible, an open source fan, and so lazy that he much prefers people to be responsible for their own machines when possible. He is tyrannical about not allowing the use of Internet Exploder, hates Windows servers, and is dismissive about fruit machines, but is otherwise quite open to new ideas. LibreOffice is the standard office suite, with MS Office for those that have particular reason to buy it. The last time I had a version of MS Word on my computer was Word for Windows 2.0 over 20 years ago.

Experience varies - if you mix versions of Word or have other complications, you get problems with documents that are smaller than that.

I did see an Excel sheet on our servers that was nearly 500 MB long. There wasn't much in it - opening and re-saving with LibreOffice brought it well under 1 MB. It had just collected changes, useless metadata, and other junk for many years, from many systems.

That is an odd use of the word "love" :-)

No argument there! :) Personally, I rarely use drag-and-drop capabilities, in Word or elsewhere. (Only in cases where a web page forces it, really.)

But I don't doubt that drag-&-drop contributes to Word imploding.

Essentially, I think what you might be describing is inadvertently placing one image atop another in Word. (bad idea, of course). I can see where th is might be easy to do with drag-and-drop. You get two images (one on top of the other) - not a replaced image. Now, modify the boundaries or proper ties of one of those images and you've got a juicy recipe for disaster. Ka

-boom. Bye-bye document. Nice knowing you. (Occurring unpredictably, of course!)

I'm in the habit of REPLACING images, which generally seems to work better. I suspect it does so simply be reducing the total accumulated amount of blo at, generally. But to your point, you can't count on more than about one p erson (namely YOU) to follow any procedures or workarounds when updating so mething like field inspection reports, etc... Unless you script it, (which itself presents several difficulties, even rolling it out), the fact that Word is a desktop application means you ultimately have no control over wha t end-users do. (i.e., Word bloat, crash, etc..)

BTW: You can automate helping Word to implode. Check out a (fairly expensive, but totally indispensable) plug-in called "A utoTag" by Winward. :)

Wonderful tool, but it can create some truly huge Word documents (when the job at hand so requires). Otherwise, forget Word and find something else.

Again BTW, re: AutoTag Great tool, highly recommended. A bit cumbersome to use until you get the hang of it. If you need to automate Word (or Office) documents to pull dat a from multiple sources, slice-&-dice, and then prepare reports (templates) , this is the tool for that -- and Word seems to like it in that it rarely blows up, even with really big files. (They don't pay me to say that.)