Why won't my in-line Word images stay put?

May 26, 2009 4:34 PM

I am a very frequent user of MS-Word, right now Word 2003. I routinely drop pictures into text documents, selecting the layout option "in line with text". I have inherited a document with wonky picture behavior, where putting a picture in-line makes most or all of it disappear. The document originator seems to have temporarily solved by floating all of the pictures over loads of paragraph marks, which is un-elegant and will not please my learned client. My mad Google skills have failed me for an explanation. I have tried everything from monkeying with the advanced layout (Picture Position) settings to lowering the acceleration on my graphics card, all to no avail. (Virtually) all suggestions will be cheerfully tried.
posted by Breav to computers & internet (10 comments total)

How about you try exporting into another document format and then re-importing into Word. That might re-set the document's properties to what you expect. (Of course it might also cause other unrelated problems but the other problems might be ones that are easier to fix.)
posted by XMLicious at 4:40 PM on May 26

Do you know what program they created the original document with? or if it was previously saved in another format? Some files can have long histories and retain hangovers from way back when. An example would be that sometimes text highlighting added in OpenOffice is completely unremovable in Word, but doubtless layout problems like this also exist between file types/formats.

A solution may simply be to create a new document, and cut'n'paste things into that bit by bit.
posted by Sova at 4:48 PM on May 26

You're probably way beyond this, but have you tried clearing all formatting? I'd select everything, then press ctrl+space (clears character formats) then ctrl+Q (clears paragraph formats). But I'm not a Word genius.
posted by anadem at 5:01 PM on May 26 [2 favorites]

Some things I've found that work:

- It's possible that your pictures are really there and would print normally (try print preview), but for some reason they aren't showing up correctly while you work on the document -- this seems to happen for big, complex documents. Select a white background for your pictures, even if there aren't any transparent areas; I've noticed that this helps a lot, especially for vector format images (ie: EPS).

- Save the pictures into a different format before inserting them. PNG and JPG work well for bitmaps, EPS works well for vector format. If pasting directly into Word, use Paste Special and try options besides the default. Try to never paste graphs directly from Excel, because this also pastes all of the data behind the graphs, which causes your document to become enormous.

- Try doing a File - Save As... on your document with a different filename. This seems to sometimes clear things up on problematic documents.

- Turn off Track Changes if it's on; also, accept all existing changes. Track Changes is really useful and neat, but it can cause some weird behaviour.
posted by Simon Barclay at 5:04 PM on May 26

Is it possible that the pictures have been pasted in as MS Office objects, with some associated text formatting? I've run into similar problems when I thought I was pasting a picture but I was actually pasting a text box (or maybe a frame) with a picture inside it (and filling it completely).

What happens when you get rid of the paragraph marks and set the picture layout to "square" or "tight"?
posted by mr_roboto at 6:15 PM on May 26

When Word seems to have corrupted a file, I'll open a new Word doc, and copy and paste the content from the bad doc to the new doc. I'll do this in chunks, using the "paste as text only" to remove any styles or formatting. Then, I'll drop the pictures back in, and reapply styles to the text.

Even in moderately large docs, this takes less time than you think.

If nothing else works, or you just want to get the troubleshooting over with, this is pretty much a nuclear option. It will fix everything because you are stripping out all of the formatting and metadata.

Good luck!
posted by mattybonez at 7:03 PM on May 26

Sometimes the documents become so complex graphically that Word goes all crazy. One thing I'd suggest is that you get rid of the paragraph spacing and put text boxes in where you want the pictures to be. Then cut the pictures out of the document and paste them into the text box. Then do all your layout formatting to the text box, not the picture.
posted by jasper411 at 8:10 PM on May 26

Select the image. Go to styles and select "normal". Or if your 'normal' has been changed, select another plain style. It has to do with how the style accommodates the preceding paragraph, I believe, and is not a factor of the image layout at all.
posted by bystander at 10:07 PM on May 26

sadly ... my experience is that the bast way to fix gronked up word documents is to copy the text into notepad, and paste it back into a new word document, reformat, then do your picture.

I am sure you can appreciate the amusement value in this ... but it is often quicker than spending 3 days screwing with formatting only to finally decide to ... copy all of the text into notepad .........
posted by jannw at 11:42 PM on May 26

Thank you to all for your suggestions. I was dreading the prospect of cutting and pasting when I was able to contact the person who created the template. The graphics behaved badly because the row height was set exactly. This was counteracted by a Style that the template creator added that has single row height. When I apply this style to the picture I can set the picture in line and it stays in place.
posted by Breav at 7:29 AM on May 28