The cliché bears repeating: a picture is worth a thousand words. That’s why you find graphs in financial reports and photos in memoirs, among many other uses.
You can easily bring photos, graphs, scanned drawings and other graphical information into a Word document. The key is to keep them in the right places, properly aligned, with the right text.
Word offers several ways of bringing images into a document. For headache-free image handling in Word, I suggest you use the following steps.
- Open a Windows Explorer or Mac Finder window to show the file icon that represents an image you want to insert.
- Create an empty line in your Word document using the Normal style where you want to insert the image.If the image is surrounded by Normal text, make the new paragraph Normal as well. If it’s in a list, use List Continue so the left edge of the image aligns with the text.
- Drag the icon from the Explorer/Finder window and drop it into the empty line you just created. The image appears where you dropped it.
Other tips
- You can often drag images from the software that you’re using to display them (unless the files are somehow protected). Such software includes web browsers (like Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox) and image handling software (like iPhoto). This saves you the step of saving the image as a separate file, which you don’t always need to do.
- You don’t need to keep images “in line” with your text, but doing so is the easiest way to both insert images and manage how they look.