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I did a few quick tests resizing grapics using Corel PhotoPaint and Word 97 SR2. Just wanted to share the results for those of you who are interested.
First of all, I took an alt+print screen shot of the Visio insert picture dialog box. I pasted it twice as a new images in PhotoPaint. I resampled them to 150 dpi, resized to 120%, then exported to bmp and jpg formats. I set the jpg compression to 0. The jpg was is K, and the bmp is 705 K, so it looks like there are significant benefits to the jpg format even if you don't compress. Unfortunately, both looked blurry (equally blurry, btw) when I inserted them into separate Word docs and printed them.
I also pasted the shot into Word and resized it there to 120% (I believe Beth suggested this?). Both on screen and printed, it looked much better than the other two.
Interestingly, the file sizes for the Word documents (containing only one image each) are as follows:
inserted jpg document - 98 K
inserted bmp document - 55.5 K (yes, the 705 K bmp!)
word-resized document - 24.5
Then I tried a new experiment, to see if I could get better results by sacrificing file size. I pasted a screen shot into PhotoPaint, increased the dpi to 600, resized to 120%, then exported to bmp. I inserted it into work, and it looked great. bmp size: 12 MB, doc size: 243 K.
I also did as Christine suggested, dumping the shot into PhotoPaint, resizing to 120% (no dpi change), converting to gif (compression set to 0) then sticking it into Word. It looks almost as good as the gargantuan bmp, and the image is 15 K and the Word doc is 28.5 K.
In summary, it looks like my tests confirm what other folks posted here recently. That is, if you are using Word 97, the way to go is to paste directly into the doc and resize from there; if you want referenced images, gifs seem to be the ticket. I suppose this doesn't really shed much light on the Flash question, but I hope the info is useful in any case.
-Eva
Still on digest; apologies for delays/repititions, please cc.
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