Linking can certainly make a big difference. The potential downside is that the images will only be available in the document on the PC on which the linking is done. That can be worked around, either by linking and embedding and/or by editing the INCLUDEPICTURE fields to use relative paths. The latter is quite fiddly to set up on docx files, though.

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Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]