Office 2007 Bible

Inserting Pictures from Files

Is a picture really worth a thousand words? It’s up to you. Pictures for their own sake might simply clutter up a document and make it more time consuming to send to somebody and more expensive to print. Used carefully, pictures enable you to show the reader what you mean. Yes, used the right way, pictures can save many paragraphs of explanation, so perhaps a picture is worth a thousand words—maybe more. If not, there wouldn’t be so many pictures in this book, helping to illustrate ideas.

You can insert pictures in Word in several ways, using pictures from a variety of different graphics formats. We’ll look at formats shortly.

If you have pictures on removable media—such as SD (secure digital), CF (compact flash), CD, or DVD—it’s usually best if those pictures have been copied to your hard drive before proceeding. While you can insert directly from such sources, or from a LAN or over the Internet, you have more options available to you if the files are on your own computer in a location that is always accessible.

You might also have pictures available from a webcam, other camera, or a scanner connected to your computer. Assuming the formats are supported, those also can be inserted into Word.

While it’s not necessary, computing life is usually easier when pictures, sounds, and other files are where Word and other programs expect them to be. In the case of pictures, the expected location is your My Pictures subfolder of the My Documents folder (Windows ...