Resizing your home
Q: Is it possible in Word 2013 to simultaneously resize a large number of photos and then rotate those photos that need rotating?
A: I am happy to address your question, after which I’ll recommend a more-efficient approach using PowerPoint rather than Word. First, let’s share with Tech Q&A readers some details you provided me that establish the context of your question:
“Our company helps customers purchase foreclosed homes, and each week we accumulate hundreds of electronic pictures of recently foreclosed homes (which meet our specific criteria) from multiple sources, including websites and images scanned from printed catalogs. For identification purposes, each downloaded and scanned photo is saved using the property’s address as the file name. We insert these photos into a Word 2013 document, add captions indicating each property’s address, and produce a PDF of the weekly available new inventory. This PDF is sent electronically to local real estate agents and is produced as catalogs available to walk-in customers. A bottleneck in this production process can occur because many of the pictures need to be resized (so all photos are the same size) and/or rotated, which is a rather labor-intensive task.”
Here’s how you can more efficiently resize and rotate the photos for use in your Word 2013 document. Before inserting your photos into the document, you can rotate them in bulk in a Windows Explorer window as follows. Launch an Explorer window and navigate to the folder containing your photos. Holding down the Ctrl key, click each photo that needs rotating to select it/them, right-click one of the selected photos to show the options menu, and then select Rotate right (or left, clockwise, or counterclockwise), as pictured below. Repeat this step if necessary. You can then move the photos into your Word document.
To more quickly resize your photos to the same height (for optimum eye appeal), consider the following two options:
1. Using the repeat command. Select a photo in Word and from the Picture Tools bar, in the Height text box, enter the desired height as a number and press Enter. Thereafter, click each photo in your Word document one at a time and press the F4 key (or Ctrl+Y) to repeat the last command. This action will resize each photo to the same height (3.5 inches in the following example).
2. Using the object approach. A second option for resizing your photos in bulk requires two steps. First, click each photo one at a time to select it, then click the Layout Options icon located next to the upper-right corner of the photo, and select the Tight layout option, as pictured below. This action will convert each photo to an object. (Warning: Depending on Word’s default format settings, this step may cause your pictures to reposition themselves, in which case you may then need to drag them back to their proper positions.)
Once each photo has been converted to an object, hold down the Ctrl key and click each photo to select them all as a group, or if you have dozens of photos, you could instead select them all in one step from the Home tab by clicking Editing, Select, Select All, as pictured below.
Once you have selected multiple photos as a group, from the Picture Tools bar, in the Height text box, enter the desired height as a number (such as 3.5 inches) and press Enter. This action will resize all selected photos to the same size. A benefit of using this approach is that you can then click and drag the grab box for a given photo to resize all selected photos at once, as suggested in the screenshot below.
J. Carlton Collins (carlton@asaresearch.com) is a technology consultant, a CPE instructor, and a JofA contributing editor.
Submit a question
Do you have technology questions for this column? Or, after reading an answer, do you have a better solution? Send them to jofatech@aicpa.org. We regret being unable to individually answer all submitted questions.
J. Carlton Collins (carlton@asaresearch.com) is a technology consultant, a CPE instructor, and a JofA contributing editor.
Submit a question
Do you have technology questions for this column? Or, after reading an answer, do you have a better solution? Send them to jofatech@aicpa.org. We regret being unable to individually answer all submitted questions.
J. Carlton Collins (carlton@asaresearch.com) is a technology consultant, a CPE instructor, and a JofA contributing editor.
Submit a question
Do you have technology questions for this column? Or, after reading an answer, do you have a better solution? Send them to jofatech@aicpa.org. We regret being unable to individually answer all submitted questions.
J. Carlton Collins (carlton@asaresearch.com) is a technology consultant, a CPE instructor, and a JofA contributing editor.
Submit a question
Do you have technology questions for this column? Or, after reading an answer, do you have a better solution? Send them to jofatech@aicpa.org. We regret being unable to individually answer all submitted questions.
