Placing pics in Word

Word is not the easiest tool when it comes to designing pages. Some things that are simple operations in any page layout program are a nightmare to try and do in Word. Fortunately, one operation that has been improved in Word 2007 is the handling of images. If you want to place a photograph, for instance, in a Word document, from the Insert menu click on "Picture", and then choose from the dialogue box that opens. When you okay the choice, Word automatically inserts it wherever you had your text cursor in the document, and if the cursor is in the middle of a line, it will break the text at that point to accommodate the image. The result is something akin to a skyscraper in a treeless landscape. But there is much you can do to improve things. When the image is imported, you will see a dotted blue line around it, which means it is selected. And the menu bar will have changed to Format. One of the most important options there is Text Wrapping, and you have many possibilities to choose from. For simple work, I suggest "Square", which allows you to drag the image around anywhere on the page, and the text will wrap around it. If you click and drag on a corner of the image, you can resize it. I also suggest playing around with the Edit Wrap Points and More Layout Options, which give a lot more control over how the image the text interact with each other.
Embedded images: One word of caution - when Word imports an image, by default it embeds it in the document. This means that all the image information is stored within the document. It has the advantage that when you send the document to another person, you don't need to send the image as well. The disadantage is that if you try to extract and save the image as a separate item, there is a massive loss of quality. And the file size of the Word document increases by the size of the image - so it takes only a few images to quickly bloat the size of the Word document to massive amounts, certainly more than most email systems will comfortably handle. There are some alternatives, which Microsoft cleverly hides until you click on a tiny triangle next to the "Insert" button at the bottom right of the dialogue box when you choose a picture to insert. Here is some help on what the alternatives mean.