Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Managing Pictures with Microsoft Office Picture Manager

Last updated Oct 1, 2004.

In keeping with this week's graphics theme here at the InformIT Office Guide this week, I thought I would introduce a neat program that is part of Office 2003 that lets you scan, edit, and manage all of your images.

In a previous update, I went through the Clip Organizer, a cataloging tool with no editing capability. Microsoft Office has other tools with editing capabilities as well as the features necessary to save images in different formats.

Microsoft has hidden these tools well. They're under Microsoft Office > Microsoft Office Tools > Microsoft Office Picture Manager.

The first thing you can use the Manager to do is to scan your local drives (not use a scanner, per se), to locate any images on your hard drive(s). Click File > Locate Pictures to bring up the Locate Pictures Panel, select a drive, and off you go.

Figure 348

Using the Picture shortcuts in the left panel, you can instantly get a look at the image files in any specific folder. Here's the folder for this article, and the first screenshot that's been captured and saved in JPG format.

Figure 349

What I want to do next is acquire images.

You can't scan directly into Picture Manager. You need to use Microsoft Office Document Scanning, which is in the same Start Menu as Picture Manager.

Opening the Document Scanning utility brings up a dialog box to select the type of image to scan (color, B&W, etc.) and perhaps another dialog box to select your scanner (if you have more than one).

Figure 350

When you click Scan, the scanner puts the image into another part of Microsoft Office, the document imaging tool.

Figure 351

Here the scanned image is enormous; it's the entire panel in the scanner. I'm going to drag a "crop box" around just the portion I want, and click Edit > Copy Image.

Figure 352

Now, back in Picture Manager, I click Edit > Paste, and Voilá!

The picture is saved into the folder as a standard BMP image. I not only know where it is, but I can use this file in any Microsoft Office program.

To see the file more closely, I click the second icon at the top left of the preview window to access Filmstrip view.

Figure 353

Unfortunately, there's nothing I can do about the sweat spots on my shirt in this program. In Adobe Photoshop or Ulead PhotoImpact, I would select another area of the shirt and copy and paste it (or clone it) over the unsightly spots.

Here I'll do the next best thing, and crop myself out of the picture.

After clicking the Edit Picture button and opening the Edit panel, I click Crop. Now I can get rid of myself in the picture and keep my friend. I can make further adjustments and see the new dimensions.

Figure 354

When I click OK, only Geoff remains. Now I can click Save to keep this picture, or Save As to create a new version.

As with any Office program, I can also click the drop down arrow to go back to Edit Picture or explore the other options in the Task Pane.

Figure 355

Now let's create a version of this picture to use in FrontPage – and post on the Web. I need to change the file type to JPG (to be seen in a web browser) and hopefully to compress the picture size significantly.

If I click Compress, I get the Compress Picture Task Pane where I can select Web Page as my target. It lets me see how the multi-megabyte image can go all the way down to a few kilobytes!

Figure 356

When I click OK, the change is subtle, but I like it. An asterisk next to the file name reminds me that I've changed my original.

So let's save this another name. I'm prompted to Create a New Image, and click Yes.

When I'm done I have two images to use. The original BMP image is great for a photo album or PowerPoint presentation. The new JPG image is saved in the same folder, and it's ideal for a Web page or to attach to E-mail.

Obviously, I could have done similar tasks in more expensive programs or using one that was bundled with my scanner or digital camera, and the same principles would apply. Always work with the best source image you can – save a local copy in a large file format with best quality – then save altered or compressed versions as new files with the settings you want.

And now you can do it all right within Office 2003.