Pictures won't display in Word documents

Question

Hi folks,   Word documents that used to display all pictures normally now only display the ones on the first page until I scroll down, then they disappear.  All the pictures on lower pages are invisible.  If I click in the spaces where they should be, an outline appears, but no picture.  Text is unaffected.   I tried pasting a small picture to a blank Word document and the same thing happened.

RoHe · Answer

Don't know a sure fix, but try:
1. Exit Word and search hard drive for normal.dot. Include hidden/system files in the search. Delete all copies of normal.dot found. When you restart Word, it'll recreate normal.dot.

2. If that doesn't do it, Help>Detect and Repair on Word toolbar. Have Office CD handy.

Ron

PiroNaut · Answer

Hi Ron,   What affect will deleting 'normal.dot' have on my settings and/or data?

RoHe · Answer

Normal.dot is the generic template that's used when you open a new/blank Word document. If you delete normal.dot, any changes that were made to the default template (eg, new default margins, new default font, toolbars changes, new hotkeys, etc) will be lost.

Deleting normal.dot has no effect on personal files or data. Existing files do not lose their formatting whether created with the generic or a modified normal.dot.

If you make extensive changes to the normal.dot template, it's a good idea to save an extra copy of it with a different name (eg, normal.new). If the current normal.dot gets corrupted (a frequent cause of Word problems), you just delete the old normal.dot and save a copy of normal.new as normal.dot. That's the way I do it, and it's saved a lot of headaches when the template gets corrupted in the middle of a big project, and there's no time to mess with recreating the modified normal.dot from scratch.

As said in my previous post, I can't promise this will resolve your problem, but it's easy to do and "relatively" harmless.

Ron

JRosenfeld · Answer

Another possibility: In Word, Tools, Options, view tab, make sure picture placeholders is not checked.

PiroNaut · Answer

OK.  That box is not checked now but it may have been before.  I've already tried deleting 'normal.dot' and it has fixed my problem for now.    What does 'picture placeholders' do?

RoHe · Answer

OK!! :) Ron

JRosenfeld · Answer

You asked What does 'picture placeholders' do?   It replaces the picture with a picture place holder so the pictures are not loaded when you open the file (the placeholder tells Word what picture and where its place is in the document) That is why I suggested that as a possibility for not seeing the pictures. This can be useful to speed up opening a large document with many large pictures (coloured photos, say), especially on a slow PC, if all you want to do is edit the text. Not that much used on modern PCs I guess.

PiroNaut · Answer

OK.  Thanks for the info.

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Pictures won't display in Word documents

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