Hi Rosie,

When you say you're copying part of an image, are you saving that part to disk as an image in its own right and then importing it into Word? If not, what might be happening is that the whole image is being inserted in a cropped format.

If you insert the pictures as links, the document's file size will be much less affected than if you embed the pictures in the document. The downside is that the links may need to be updated if the picture location changes.

For end-users, you may find it best to convert the document to PDF before distribution. That way, you can be sure that the page layout rmains consistent for all users. Moreover, PDFs with images are often significantly smaller than the Word files from which they're generated.

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Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]