5 Tips for Optimizing Images in Word Documents

“An image worth thousand words…” You may hear about it! if this is true, “how about hundred images?” Using images in desktop publishing has become essential because of above sentence. Not only in desktop publishing and graphic design, this story also remains same in word processing. The size of a word document with more images is extremely larger than that of same word document with no images. Therefore optimizing images in word documents is really important to ensure faster loading.

Generally a word processing app requires more time and system memory to open a larger word document which having more images. Also it takes more time when sharing via internet. I this article, I tried to explain most of the aspects of optimizing images in word processing and finally to ensure faster loading of your word documents.

5 Tips for Optimizing Images of Word Documents

Tip 01: Size is the Key

If you know that a 250px X 250px image is enough for your document, why you use a larger one? Never do it! I repeat “size is the key“, use required sized images only. Please remember! Resizing images within your word processor is not much affect on the size of word document.

Tip 02: You aren’t a Graphic Designer, are you?

Graphic designers are use high quality (often – 100% quality) images for their design jobs because they need a higher quality output from their work. But as a word processor, you and me do not need highest quality images. Adjust the quality percentage of images so that it does not affect on the appearance.In my experience, I recommend you to use between 70% and 80% quality images for your word processing works.

Tip 03: Is Resizing within Word Processor Worth Much?

I hope you read and understood the first topic of this article “size is the key”. Now you will ask me, “Why I should use a third-party software to resize images, can’t I do it after inserting them into my word processing app?” Yes, you can! but the impact on file size is minimum. Try it yourself, you may realize it!

Resizing images after inserting into word processor is not made a significant change of file size of word document.

Tip 04: Compress Images Before Saving

You can decrease the file size using Image compression features of your word processing app. Compress inserted pictures before saving to reduce the file size of word document(s). Compressing pictures is significantly reduces the size of a word document.

Tip 05: Just Cropping is not Enough!

What is cropping? Cropping is “removing” unwanted parts from an image. Most of new word processing apps allows to crop images to “remove” its unwanted parts. Actually cropping “removes” unwanted parts from an image? Absolutely not! It just HIDE the cropped area of images. If you moved back cropping handles again, you can get cropped areas of images at anytime. Therefore you have to remove cropped areas to reduce the size of images.

How to Compress Images and Remove Cropped Areas of Images in MS Word?

Step 01: Select an image of your document and click Compress Pictures command of Adjust group in the Picture tools – Format tab.

Step 02: Check Apply to selected pictures only if you need to do so. And click on Options… button. The Compression Settings Dialog box may appear.

Step 03: Under the Compression Settings dialog box, check Delete cropped areas of pictures if you need to remove the cropped regions of the images.

Step 04: The check box with Automatically perform basic compression on save keep activated.

Step 05: Select the desired output quality of images from Target output group. Here, Print – maximum quality, E-mail – minimum quality.

Step 06: Finally, click OK on both dialog boxes to save settings and close them. Your new setting will apply on images of the document.