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.

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.

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).

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.