MS-Word2007: Compressing Pictures

Overview
If you scan drawn images of your storyboard into a Word document you may find you have created a monster file. Word 2007 has a picture compress facility that will dramatically reduce the document size.

Scanned images in MS-Word

 * 1) Click on a picture in your document
 * 2) on the ribbon bar click on Format (Picture>Format)
 * 3) To the left of the bar is a compress option.
 * Don't forget to check compress all images (second option).

Note that if you are using a doc file the dialog box is a little different (Select either screen or email -96dpi) depending on how compressed you want the document to be. Remember if you compress and save you cannot "de-compress" later! so always Save As until you are happy with the result)

PowerPoint to Word
If you have used Word to create your pages and you want to insert them into a Word document -- don't just copy the slide and paste into word. This will create a PowerPoint object in word and will not allow compression. Instead use copy (from powerPoint) then Paste Special in Word and select png.

Finding the problem images
If you have Word 2007 or 2010 they will save a Word document as a docx file (rather than doc). This is actually just a zip file with a docx extension. So, to find out your problem images:


 * 1) If your file is a doc file save as a docx, or make a copy of the file if it is a docx.
 * 2) Rename the new docx to zip
 * 3) double click the zip file (or open the archive in your un-zipper program)
 * 4) Look in the folder word/media, and you should see the images and their file sizes.
 * 5) Double click on the images to see which ones they are,
 * 6) Remove the images in the original document and resize.