Create photo albums with Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word is a great choice for embedding photos for a few reasons. You can place more than one image on a page, the images can be positioned, text can be included, you can fix the margins that are suitable for printing, and you can do a Page Preview to see how the printed page will look.
 
A major change occurred between Word versions of the 6.0 and 95 eras, with Word 97 and newer being built on an entirely new platform. With the older versions, placement and sizing of images depended to some extent on the use of frames. In the newer versions, an entirely different set of features and tools are available to determine how the images and text will be positioned and sized. The newer Word versions integrate well with other MS Office applications. This discussion will be limited to the newer versions of Word.
 
Photo images should be archived in a folder with appropriate file names and file extensions before attempting to place them on a page in Word. Thus, a user must do a 'Save As' or an 'Extract' operation to copy the data from a scanned temporary file into a saved and named file that can be considered transportable.
 
For introductory purposes, comments about the use of placing images into Word will be kept simple. You can get fancier, but it's better to start with the stuff that's easier.
 
When taking an image from the scanner software and using it elsewhere, you do a Save As or an Export to take the data from the temporary scanned image and save it as a named file in a designated folder. Also, you have the choice of selecting the file extension, like JPG, GIF, BMP, etc. When you select JPG, you may also have to select a "quality" value, e.g., 70 on a scale of 0 to 100. This determines a quality selection of the resultant JPG image. Higher numbers give more accurate JPG images, and result in larger file sizes.
 
If you are dealing with family or scenery images, choosing JPG and a quality setting of 70 is probably a good idea.
 
To practice placing images in a Word file, open the Word application and get an unsaved file showing a blank page (it will also have a default setting for margins as determined by a prior template setting for Word documents). Change the margin settings in File|Page Setup, if desired. If you want to orient the paper so the 11-inch dimension is sideways, select Landsacpe in File|Page Setup|Paper Size.
 
To do things the simple way, start out by hitting the Enter key a few times to place a few paragraph symbols down the left margin. Next, you may as well hit the paragraph icon on the Word toolbar, so you see all the formatting symbols.
 
Doing these things sets up the page for you to choose an entry point for inserting each photo. When a photo image is inserted it can be done by Pasting from your virtual clipboard, or by choosing to Insert the photo file. The insertion point is determined by the location of the cursor. The cursor's vertical location is set to a vertical line location made available by the paragraph marks, and it's horizontal location is determined by tabs and spaces (or text). The cursor is placed in the normal way, using either the mouse pointer or the keyboard.
 
Upon Pasting or Insertion of the image, it will appear in a location with its upper left corner "anchored" to the insertion point. Its size may be varied by dragging on the small black square at the lower right of the photo.
 
Having a string of paragraph symbols going down the page, and in particular, having one of them above the first 'anchor' and a few below the previous "anchors" will allow you some flexibility in what you can do on the rest of the page.
 
When a page layout is complete, you should do a File|Save As to save it.
 
More advanced topics
 
You will soon recognize that the basic steps don’t provide as much control or flexibility of page layout as you want.

Some steps will be described which have been patterned after techniques developed by the author. Thus, these may be regarded as guidelines for doing most of things you want to do, but may not be the most direct or most elegant ways to accomplish a task.

The following comments will apply to such topics as positioning and sizing of the images with respect to columns and paragraphs of text layout, and controlling the relationship between the appearance of text layout and specific images. These have been found to cover most of the layout considerations usually encountered.

As before, it may be helpful to have a string of paragraph marks along the left margin. Also, if you have some question about the relative sequence that Word assumes for images and text, you may want to show the formatting symbols and to use the keyboard arrows that step the cursor up or down.

An image can be fixed in relation to a chosen insertion point (each insertion point will appear as an 'anchor' when displaying formatting marks). To do so in an unambiguous way usually requires the completion of a sequence of steps that seem peculiar.

Use is made of the Format|Picture dialog box that is chosen for a given image. First, select an image by doing a left-click on it, which highlights the image, as evidenced by the appearance of a frame and 8 little black squares that appear at the corners and at the mid-point of each edge of the image. Then click on Format, and then Picture to get the drop-down dialog box. Note that Picture will not be available as a menu choice unless a picture has been highlighted.

Choose the Layout tab, and click on a Wrapping style other than the default style 'In line with text.' This lets you begin to do the positioning that is enabled with the use of the Advanced button. After clicking the Advanced button, you’ll see a dialog box that allows you to make Horizontal and Vertical position settings. There will be some defaulted settings shown on this dialog box – specifically -- the Absolute position 'radio button' is highlighted with a dot, and the Horizontal position value of the insertion point in inches measured on the page are referenced to 'Column,' while the Vertical position value of the insertion point in inches measured on the page are referenced to 'Paragraph.' There are three small boxes near the bottom which have defaulted check marks in 'Move with text' and in 'Allow overlap.' Accept these default settings.

Now for the steps that don’t seem to make sense, but are often needed to fix the image in its place. Replace the values in inches for the Horizontal and the Vertical position by 0 and click on the first OK, then the second OK. This will place the image at the extreme upper-left corner of the page, where it will remain highlighted. Now the highlighting of the image will consist of 8 hollow squares and no frame. Next, do a Format|Picture again and click on Layout. Now the small window slots for positional values will be negative values of inches that indicate the position of the upper-left corner of the image (now at the corner of the page) relative to its insertion point.

In these small slots, note that there is an up- arrow triangle and a down-arrow triangle in each slot. Click on the lower arrow of each slot, which will replace the values with 0, and click OK. This will return the image to the insertion point and prepare it to be positioned precisely in relation to the reference 'Column' and 'Paragraph' location of its insertion point.

When the Wrapping text selection 'Behind text' has been made, this is the time to re-click it, as discussed below.

From experience, a user may find that the judicious choice of insertion points can have an impact on the successful layout of a page.

Note also that image size as well as other features of how the images and text integrate with each other is selected in the Format Picture dialog box set.

The features dealing with image size are found on the page selected with the Size tab.

The features dealing with how the text integrates with a given image may be selected on the Layout page as one of the four choices other than 'In line with text,' which doesn’t provide for positioning. Each of the four selections will give a brief description of what the selection provides. One thing to note is that the choice 'Behind text' has to be selected twice in the positioning steps shown above, because making this selection just once will not suffice.

'Stitching' two images together.
 
Occasionally you will have two images that could not be copied as a single image, and you would like to join them into one image again. Programs like Word and Publishing allow you to do that simply by butting the two images side-by-side. Then if you need to extract this joined image as a single image you can do a screen capture of it.

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