Resizing images in Microsoft Word is something most of us do at some point—whether you’re creating a document for work, school, or a personal project. While it’s easy to do, it’s just as easy to do it wrong, which can leave your images looking stretched, squashed, or blurry.
There are a few easy ways to resize an image in Microsoft Word. In this post, we’ll focus on using the correct methods so your images look perfect.
One of the most common mistakes people make is resizing an image by adjusting only the height or the width, not both. This can quickly distort the picture and make it look unprofessional. To avoid this, it’s important to maintain the image’s aspect ratio.
Maintaining the aspect ratio means the image gets bigger or smaller evenly—both in height and width—so it doesn’t look distorted. If you don’t do this, the image might end up stretched or squashed, like this:
What is Aspect Ratio?
The aspect ratio is the relationship between the width and the height of an image. When you keep this ratio locked, the image will resize proportionally and will not loose it’s shape or distort. If you don’t keep the aspect ratio, the image might appear stretched out wide or squashed down flat, which can make photos look odd and graphics hard to read.
This is especially important when working with photos, logos, or other detailed images. A distorted image can take away from the overall quality of your document, so getting this right makes a big difference.
Microsoft Word does offer tools that help with resizing images properly, and once you understand how to keep the aspect ratio locked, you’ll be able to resize any image without worrying about it looking strange.
To resize an image using the Ribbon
Now let’s open up Microsoft Word and look at how we can resize an image correctly.
- Launch Microsoft Word and open an existing document which contains an image or create a new blank document and insert an image:
- Click once on the picture so that the resize handles appear:
- The Picture Format tab will now be displayed on the Ribbon, click this to display the options available.
- You can now use the Size group of functions to specify a precise size of either the height or width of your picture, you will see Word will automatically adjust the alternative measurement to maintain the correct height to width ratio.
- Use the up and down arrows adjacent to the Height or Width fields to adjust the image size to the desired size:
To resize an image using the Resize Handles
Another quick and easy way to resize an image is by using the resize handles. Once you click on the image, small circles (or squares) will appear around the edges. To keep the image looking right, always drag from one of the corner handles—this maintains the aspect ratio and prevents the image from becoming stretched or distorted. Avoid dragging the side or top handles unless you want to adjust only one dimension.
To resize using the resize handles:
- Click to select the image.
- Place the cursor over one of the corner resize handles:
- Click and drag the resize handle towards the middle of the image to reduce the size or towards the edge of the screen to increase the size.
When manually resizing the best thing to remember is “Always use a corner resize handle” which are shown as white circles, this will ensure that both the height and width is adjusted at the same time and will maintain the height to width ratio of your image.
If you click off your image you will lose the Picture Format tab. It is a contextual tab, therefore, it is only displayed when you have an image selected.
If you have a large number of images within your document, you may like to take a look at my post which demonstrates how to compress your pictures to reduce file sizes in Word.
One Response
Over the last few days, every photo I insert retains its size and has greyed out resize handles rather than the empty ones shown above. I’ve unchecked the ‘fix aspect ratio’ box and tried other settings by trial and error, but haven’t solved the problem yet. Any suggestions how to regain the sizing handles?