Image compression in Word 365 doesn't function

Question

HI,

I have documents with images as separators, covers, etc. When printing or converting to PDF, I'm fine with them being at 220dpi or higher. This makes the average word document around 25-40mb in size.

When sending for review or discussion, I'd like to compress the images. They are already in JPG format -- previously I used PNG which is worse. Some images like charts or infographics, I would keep them at high resolution but some images, separators, etc I would like to compress to email size (96dpi). but each time I try to do it. Nothing actually happens. File stays the same. Tried all the below but nothing works:

• Tried in outside of OneDrive (i.e. Win10 desktop)
• Restarted
• Replaced image with another and tried compressing
• Tried my Mac Word 365 version
• Tried corporate account or personal account

Word version on my Windows desktop is : Microsoft 365 MSO (Version 2503 Build 16.0.18623.20208) 32-bit.

Answer 1

PDF size doesn't matter. I can solve that easily.

My problem is in Word only. I'm using JPG images that are print quality but previously, compressing them selectively works -- certain infographics I leave at full res as compression typically looks bad. The below used to work flawlessly. Saving as DOCX for people to edit text.

Already checked/unchecked the options: currently set to:

Checked - Discard editing data

Unchecked - Do Not compress images in file

Answer 2

You can't tell Word which images in a document you want compressed and which ones you don't. It's an all or nothing. If you want to selectively compress images, you'll have to do it outside Word using an image editor like Gimp (free) or Photoshop. If you're concerned about PDF size, you could use a vector image for your separators. Vector images tend to be smaller in size.

> I'd like to compress the images ... File stays the same. Tried all the below but nothing work

Are you printing to PDF or saving as PDF? Try saving to PDF and use these setting to create small size PDFs: