I'm working on a Word document with lots and lots of old black and white photos (some not very good) that needs to be uploaded to a self-publishing site in pdf form. Have just done a trial upload and (duh) the photos are all set at 72 dpi instead of 300 dpi or more.



Question 1: Is it possible to change the dpi *within* the Word doc without actually deleting them one by one, re-setting the dpi, and re-inserting them all again, thereby messing with the overall format on every single page, after I finally have it all nicely set?

I fear the answer is no, but before I add many more hours to this family history project I thought I would ask the knowledgeable and helpful people here.

Question 2: My new version of Word 16.73 will not allow me to do a "save as" pdf. When I click on "Save as", under File, no box comes up to enable me to save as anything. I work around by going through the print process but even that is tricky - have to open in preview before saving as. Am I missing something or has something got corrupted?
Thanks
Maureen

I don't recommend changing the resolution of the photos individually. That is a whole lot of effort for no real value if you are going to export to PDF.

When you create a PDF from a Word document you have options to change the resolution of the photographs. If your machine with v16.73 is not showing a SaveAs dialog where you can choose PDF then we need to work out how to do that. One of my machines has version 16.0.5395.1000 and the first screen gets me to choose a location but the the second screen asks for a filename and file type. On that second screen, once I choose PDF, I can Optimize for either Standard (better photo resolution) or Minimum size (probably 72dpi).

There are multiple ways to produce PDF output from Word and if you also use third party tools like Adobe Acrobat or Nuance PowerPDF they add functionality to MS Office so you have additional options to set image resolutions while creating PDFs. I would also expect that there are online tools which allow you to convert Word to PDF with options to set image resolution.

Finally, you might also be able to run a macro which converts a Word document to a PDF and specify the image resolution as part of it.

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Thanks for your reply. I have been able to bring up the "save as" dialog box now to make a pdf - the good old trick of turning the computer off and then on again (should have thought of that sooner!).

I had already downloaded PDF Expert app earlier and it appeared to make the pdf correctly, but it just gave me the option of "best for printing". Is that equivalent to your Standard setting?

Thanks

I am not familiar with that particular app but it sounds like any option related to 'best for printing' would be intended to return higher resolution images. It should be easy enough to check by zooming in to various images to see how they look close up.

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Okay thank you. I think this should do the trick.