Microsoft Word - Missing Images

Hello all,

I wonder if anybody can offer some advice please. One of my colleagues is creating technical training notes and the document is approximately 21.4mb in size which includes inserted images. The problem we are having with the system is that the word document comes up with a table which has corrupted and also further down the page there is a image which appears blank when inserted. The message that comes up is "not enough memory or disk space to display or print picture". If we try and amend the document and save it, we still end up getting the not enough memory message meaning we cannot do anything further with the document.

This document is stored on a network drive which has plenty of free HD memory so I am presuming it's some sort of internal memory problem in the PC as I have tried to open the document on my own machine with the same results.

Any idea's or solutions to this problem as a member in our IT team has advised us the maximum size of a word document should be no more than 20mb although we have some which are 3 or 4 times that size and do not have any problems.

 

It's possible the file is corrupt in some way, not just the table. A colleague and I had this problem about 4 years ago.

We have no idea what the cause was but we wanted to copy the file we had just made to a floppy disk and were rather startled to discover the size of the file was over 50Mb. (Floppies only hold 1.44Mb.) We had made various documents of a very similar nature, all of which were capable of being placed on a floppy disk. We discovered that adding just one screenshot was increasing the file size each time by around 3-5mb and sometimes worse. I don't remember for sure, but I think that we tried copying one of the pictures to a new file and that also ended up larger than it should have done. Given that we had only just started creating that document and had a long way to go, we had to start fresh.

I would strongly suggest checking the size before opening it again and then adding ONE picture, saving the file, and then checking the size of the file again. Open a new Word document and paste the same picture there. Save the new file and check the file size. If you find the original document has gone up significantly more in size than the new one (a new Word document with only text is usually around 20-40kb), then I would suggest that there is a fault with the Word document and it would be worth starting it again.

If there is sufficient text in the current document that your colleague doesn't want to lose it, save a text only version of the document and then the text can be copied back later - this won't cause bloating of your new file. To do that, choose File - Save AS instead of just File - Save and look for txt in the file type box. Another way is simply to use Edit - Select All in the Word document, then open NotePad and Edit - Paste into that. You will lose all the pictures (and possibly the table) and can then take that text into a new copy of Word. Close Word down and reopen it before making your new document.

With regards to the blank newly inserted image; Word sometimes shows you an empty image box if the image won't fit completely on the page it is on. The next page will show the picture. Could that be what is happening?

Just another point to consider; if you are using screenshots for documentation, it might pay to reduce the screen colours before you start - this will also help to keep the file size down. Right-click on an empty area of the desktop and choose Properties. Choose the Settings tab. Use the drop-down arrow under Colors to choose a lower setting.

 

Good point. Geezer7348, what technique has been used to create those images inserted into that Word file? When I make screen prints, I usually copy them into Paint and save them as a .jpg file. But, you, or you colleague, might benefit by experimenting with different file types for the images.

 

I usually paste screenshots straight into Word - I find pasting into Paint and then inserting the resulting jpg into Word increases the file size. I'm normally using Word 2000.

Something I've known for a while, though - if you crop a picture using Word's Picture toolbar, it isn't a true crop - Word keeps the cropped areas hidden and you could use crop to get them back. Likewise, a few weeks ago, I finally got round to seeing what happens if you change a picture from colour to greyscale - the colour data is kept.

If the cropped areas aren't needed or the colour, it might be that a Paint-inserted jpg would keep the file smaller instead, due to the fact that Word is never given the colour and cropped parts of the picture in the first place. I'm not able to test this at the moment.