Importing, Exporting, and Compressing Graphics
Clip art has its place, especially in presentations and informal documents. But professional-quality corporate reports typically require graphics such as photographs or image files produced by professional graphics artists. To add graphic files to Office documents, choose Insert, Picture, From File.
Office can read any graphics file format for which it has "filters," the software that converts the graphic format into data usable inside the Office application. This is a particularly good illustration of the practical value of Office's Installed on First Use setup option.Install those filters you know for certain you will use, and if you encounter a different one, Office prompts you to install the necessary additional filter.
Choosing Embedding or Linking
When you place a picture file into an Office document, it automatically goes in the working text layer, not the drawing layer. As Figure 5.11 shows, Word gives you three choices; PowerPoint and Excel offer a smaller number of choices:
Figure 5.11. Word lets you Insert, Link to File, or Insert and Link a picture in a file.
Insert— This choice embeds the picture, physically placing it in the document. If you aren't overly worried about file sizes, don't need any history telling you where the picture came from, and don't care whether the picture gets updated, this is your best choice. This choice is available in PowerPoint, FrontPage, and Excel as well.
Link to File— This choice puts a pointer to the picture in the document. The picture itself is never placed in the document. Instead, it's brought in as needed to display on the screen, or print on the printer. If there's a chance the picture will be changed, and you need to reflect those changes in your document, this is your only option. This menu choice is available in PowerPoint and Access but not in Excel or FrontPage.
Insert and Link— This hybrid option (available only in Word and Outlook messages) puts a copy of the picture in the document, but maintains a link as well. That way, when the picture is needed, Office can try the link. If the picture isn't found, it reverts to the copy stored in the document. This is especially useful for documents stored on portable computers because it ensures that graphics will be available when you are away from the office and your network, while still allowing the option to update the image when you reconnect to the network.
Office frequently uses fully qualified filenames as the links, which can cause problems if you move either the picture file or the document. If you link the picture C:My Documents My Pictures3dogs.pcx in a document and move the document to a second machine, the picture must be located in the same folder hierarchy or Office won't be able to find it, and will substitute a meaningless placeholder (see Figure 5.12).
Figure 5.12. The dreaded "missing link" placeholder graphic. If you see this placeholder, it means Office couldn't find the picture.
When should you embed graphics and when should you link? Follow these guidelines:
If you repeatedly use the same graphic—for example, a letterhead logo—link to it and make sure it doesn't move. Otherwise, your document archive will explode in size.
In a networked environment, linking works if the graphic is in a shared network folder that's accessible to all persons who use the document. If you don't have ready access to the shared folder, insert the graphic.
If you plan to distribute documents externally, you must insert the graphics, unless all the files reside in the same folder as the document, or the recipients are savvy enough to replicate the folder structure on the machine where the document was first created.
If you discover broken image links in your document, see
"Fixing Broken Image Links"
in the
"Troubleshooting"
section at the end of this chapter.
Resizing and Cropping
When you insert a picture into a document, it appears full size. If the picture file is six inches wide, that's what you'll see in your document.
More often than not, you'll need to resize the picture, which you do by selecting it and maneuvering the sizing handles. The corner handles enable you to resize it proportionally; the other handles alter the picture's proportions, or aspect ratio.
The Picture toolbar also gives you a fast way to crop the picture; that is, select the portions of the picture that will be visible in the document. To bring up the Picture toolbar, right-click any visible toolbar or the main menu bar and choose Picture.
The Picture toolbar also enables you to make a few adjustments in picture quality: contrast, brightness, color, and the like.
Tip from 
In Word, you can avoid some sizing hassles by drawing a text box where you want to place the graphic and then inserting the graphic into the text box. The graphic is resized automatically. If the picture is already in the document, click it once, and then click the Text Box button on the Drawing toolbar to surround the image with a box.
Compressing Graphics for Web Pages and Presentations
Unless you're going to print a graphic on a high-resolution printer—in which case you can probably use all the detail you can get—chances are good that you can use Office's built-in Compress feature to squeeze down the size of the graphic. This will reduce the size of the document without any significant detrimental effect. To compress a graphic, follow these steps:
Click the graphic to select it.
Right-click and choose Format Picture.
On the Picture tab, choose Compress…. You'll get the Compress Pictures dialog box (see Figure 5.13).
Choose from Web/Screen resolution (at a nominal 96 dots per inch, which is fine for most monitors); Print (nominal 200 dots per inch, which will produce a fuzzy but legible picture); or No Change (which you would use if you wanted to delete cropped portions of the picture without affecting the resolution of what remains visible). Click OK.
Although PowerPoint doesn't have this specific feature, it does enable you to specify a low-resolution alternative to the chosen picture. To use the option, right-click the picture, and choose Picture Properties to bring up the General tab.
Using Advanced Picture Effects
Inserted graphics can be grouped, ordered, wrapped, layered, and given colored backgrounds, borders, 3D, or shadow treatments, just like other Office graphics. They can also be placed inside a Drawing canvas. Note that in Word, assigning layout formatting to a linked graphic breaks the link.
AutoShape 3D effects are not available for pictures (both clip art and imported files) when they are in the working text layer, but a limited number of shadow effects are. The full complement of effects is available if you put a text box around the picture. This enables you to frame your art in a way that can spell the difference between a document that looks routine and one that looks professional.
One popular professional graphics effect in Excel involves replacing colored or textured bars, wedges, and other chart components with pictures. Follow these steps to do so:
Create the chart. Right-click the chart object where you want to use a picture (a data series in a column chart, for example) and choose the appropriate Format option—Format Data Series, in this example.
Click the Patterns tab, and then click the Fill Effects button. On the Fill Effects dialog box, choose the Pictures tab.
Click the button marked Select Picture, and choose the picture you want to use.
If you want the picture to be distorted so a single image fits on the chart object, click Stretch. If you want pictures to be placed one on top of the other, choose the Stack option. Click OK twice to place the picture on the chart object (see Figure 5.14).
Figure 5.14. You can use a picture to "paint" any component of an Excel chart.
