Why does inserting pics in Word .doc make file SO big

[bigred]

I have a 500K pic file (.jpg). I insert it into 4K document.

It's now 8MB file. :boggled:

I tried saving pics as other formats, even the normally much smaller .gif, with little diff. Any way to do this so the document doesn't balloon in size? Thx

[TheDaver]

Put the pics and document in a dedicated folder, and have Word link to the pics rather than embedding them.

[elgarak]

Right-click on the image, "Format Picture", "Picture" tab, "Compress". I'm not sure what options are there (on a Mac, which doesn't have this function), but in Word 2003 there was definitely a resolution setting. If you play around with that, keep in mind what's the purpose of the file is. If it's meant to be printed, keep this value at 300 dpi or so. For screen usage, you can go down to 92 dpi or so. Beside resolution change, Word 2007 also has a separate compression setting, but I'm not sure if this was already there in Word 2003.

[paximperium]

As already mentioned, if you don't change the settings, the pictures that are embedded are not compressed. If you have the setting completely wrong, word can convert it to at a bmp (ie. uncompressed at all and frickin huge) format.

[bigred]

The compress made a HUGE diff. Thanks very much!

(dave didn't mention I need to email these so I don't think would have worked out, but thanks also)