Shrinking Images in Excel?

Question

One of my Users has a Microsoft Excel 2003 spreadsheet with about 50 images in it.

All of the images were shot in high resolution but have been rescaled so that you can fit several of them on a single page. Understandably this makes them look smaller but doesn't make them any smaller on the Megabyte front, meaning that the Spreadsheet is massive.

Is there any way to batch convert all of the images in the spreadsheet so that they are actually resized, not just rescaled? I've tried using the Compress funtion and this has knocked about 1/3 off of the document size, but the images are still high resolution.

They only need them to be about 100 by 100 Pixels wide, not 1200. This can be done manualy using a graphics package, but it would be a chore to do so. Can they automate this, or at least do it using Excel rather than a third part package?

abach · Answer

You mentioned the images were rescaled. How did you do this?

Short of using the compress picture task, there isn't much more Excel can do. However, your pictures will compress much better if they are inserted by using Insert, Picture, From File instead of pasting them. So, if you did use the paste feature, remove them and use the Insert task.

My guess is you'll have to use another program to accomplish the resize. Or, if possible, just save the file as a PDF.

KnaufIT · Answer

I didn't create the file so I'm not certain how the images were inserted, but knowing the users involved it's most probably that they did use the insert function.

The don't have access to much in the way of graphics packages so they wouldn't have cut and pasted them. The images woldhave been rescaled in the normal way.

Rescaling: When you insert an image into Excel if you hover the cursor over the sides or corners you age given a drag cursor, you can then drag the edges of the image inwards to shrink it or outwards to expand it. This changes the size of the image as it is displayed, but it doesn't change the image itself. If you insert a 2000 pixel image and rescale it to be 200 pixels, it is only displayed smaller, it doens't actually get any smaller. So a 2000 pixel rescaled to 200 pixels still retains all of its original data.

Saving the file as a PDF kind of defeats the purpose of usig a spreadsheet. When you convert an Excel spreadsheet into a PDF it becomes read only. Yuo can't edit it or use it for calculations any more.

abach · Answer

I inserted a 4 meg jpg file into an Excel worksheet, saved the file and had a file size of 4.39 MB. I selected the picture, chose the Compress feature, saved the file, and had a file size of 39 KB. The compress feature is the only way I know of to shrink the file size. Make sure you are compressing for Web/Screen (96dpi).

KnaufIT · Answer

That was pretty much the first thing that I tried. It worked for 7/10 images, but there were so many images in the document that it was a real chore just finding which ones it hadn't worked for.

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Shrinking Images in Excel?

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