How to Crop a Picture in Word

Video Transcript

"Hello, my name is Luis Estrada, and I am a software developer. In this video, I'll show you how to crop a picture in Word. Word is a registered trademark of Microsoft, a company to which I have no affiliation. Let's include an image in Word. Select Insert and Picture. Click on the Crop tool. Grab the picture from any of the edges and drag. Now, you have a few options to save the document. You can save it as Docx file. That would make it comparable with only Word 2007. The other option is to save it as the old Doc format that makes it compatible with Word 97', XP, and 2003 versions. There's a big difference in the way Word saves cropped images. Let's save two versions on the file; one in the Doc X, and another in the Doc format. When you go to the folder where you stored the files, you see a big difference in the file size. The Doc file has a size of three megabytes, which is the size of the original picture, while the Docx file is about two hundred and fifty kilobytes. The Doc file inserts the image in the document, and even when you have cropped the image or make it smaller, the picture file size remains the same. In contrast, the docx file compresses the image at the time of saving. To manually compress the image and remove the cropped parts of the picture, click on the image, select Picture Tools, and Compress Pictures. You can apply compression to all images in the document, or only to the selected ones. Choose a resolution, depending on the final distribution of the document. If you will be printing the document select a 200 dpi resolution. On the other hand, if you plan to view the document only in your computer, select the Web or Screen resolution. The higher the resolution, the bigger the file size. If you are unsure about the final output of the document select No Change. This leaves the picture in its original resolution. Make sure that the Compress Pictures and Delete cropped areas options are selected, click OK. Then, you are reminded that compression will reduce the original quality of the picture. Press apply, save the file. Go to your folder, and now you will see that the new file size is only a fraction of the original. I am Luis Estrada, and I've just shown you how to edit your digital images."