How to insert, edit and manipulate images in Microsoft Office documents

Pictures and images are a necessary part of many MS office documents. We use them to better present and illustrate ideas, explain concepts, and make our documents more interesting and visually appealing.

Actually, it has been proven that the brain learns better when there are images and illustrations presented along with text. Many are not aware that the MS Office suite offers a large set of features for editing images once they are inserted into a document.

Taking screenshots

If you want to illustrate or explain a process to someone, taking screenshots of your active screen is a good idea. Even though there is software available just for creating and editing screenshots, there really is no need to download and install this type of software if you already have MS Office.

You can insert screenshots directly from your Word, Excel or PowerPoint programs. Simply go to Insert – Screenshot and you will be presented with images of all your active screens. Choose the appropriate screen and the image of the screen will be automatically pasted in your document. Only two clicks are needed.

Edit images

Microsoft Office offers very good image editing possibilities as well. Even though it can’t be compared to software like Adobe Photoshop and other software that is specifically created for editing and manipulating images, the options are still plentiful.

To edit images in MS Office, simply click twice on every image to open the Picture formatting tab.  You can adjust the color, borders, and size of every image, as well as add special effects, change contrasts, shapes, remove backgrounds, insert text and much more.

Cropping image/Change dimensions

After taking a screenshot, you might not need the whole image, but just the part of it. Use the Crop option to remove unnecessary parts of the image.

It is also possible to change the dimensions in order to make the image fit into the document better.

Compressing images

Some images can be very big, and increase the file size of the whole document when inserted, making it very bulky. This makes documents slow and difficult to send or share with other over the Internet. One of the options for compressing an MS Office document can be to convert it to a PDF, which can be done with Cometdocs. Another thing you can try to do is to compress all of the images within the file. Simply click the Compress Image option found on the Format Picture tab and choose one of the available resolutions.

Have in mind though that compressing the image might damage its quality.