Habitually Good

Have you ever taken screenshots from your computer screen and pasted them directly into a word document? Have you then tried to email that document? More often than not, such a document would be very heavy in size. To combat this, I have seen people first paste a screenshot into something like Paint and then save it as a jpeg and then insert it into the document. Well, till recently, I used to do that as well.

As it turns out, Microsoft Word has built-in functionality for compressing images. The screenshots below show how to do it in Word 2003:

1. Paste the screenshot in the document and right-click it. Select the Format Picture menu item on the context menu.

   

2. Choose the Picture Tab on the resulting dialogue box and press the Compress button in the lower-left corner of the tab

   

3. Select relevant options from the resulting dialogue box and watch file size of your doc file shrink

   

Of course, in Office 2007, it is a whole different ball game. Once you select the screenshot you have posted, you can choose the Picture Tools on the ribbon. And then click on the “Compress Pictures” button on the Ribbon to achieve the same effect.

As it turns out (by quickly Googling) that this tip is very well documented, and I was the ignorant one. However, I am still blogging this so that in case someone stumbled on my blog and they didn’t know about this, this comes in handy.

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