Placing Many Graphics in a Document

Margot has about 60 scanned graphics that she wants to print in a Word document. She'd like to place the graphics on consecutive pages, one graphic per page. That, however, is a lot of picture placing, so Margo wonders if there is a quick way to insert all the graphics at once.

Inserting the graphics into a Word document is relatively easy. Here are the general steps on how to accomplish it:

1. Make sure that all the images you want to insert are in their own folder.
2. Create a brand-new Word document.
3. Choose to insert a graphic. Word displays an insertion dialog box that looks very much like a standard Open dialog box.
4. Navigate to the folder that contains the images.
5. Select all the images by clicking on the first image and then holding down the Shift key as you click on the last image. (An alternative way to do this is to click on any image and then press Ctrl+A. This selects all the images.)
6. Click Insert.

That's it; Word inserts all the images in your document. Sound simple? It is simple, but there are other things to consider that will affect the quality of what you get.

First, you need to understand that if all your images are different sizes, then there will be little consistency in sizing in what is inserted in your document. Word automatically, when inserting pictures, resizes them to fit within the margins of the page. Thus, if an image is too large for the margins, it is shrunk down to fit within the margins. If an image fits within the margins without resizing, then it is inserted at its full, original size. If this is unacceptable to you, you may want to resize your images to their final size—a size that will fit between the margins—before inserting them in the Word document.

Second, depending on the size of your images, you may end up with multiple images per page. If you want a single image on each printed page, the easiest way to accomplish the task is to do a Find and Replace operation after the images are inserted in the document. You want to search for ^g and replace it with ^&^m. What this does is to find all the graphics in the document and replace them with what was found (the graphic) followed by a manual page break. Click on Replace All, and you end up with a single graphic on each page.

Finally, if you intend on adding some text below each picture (perhaps an explanation, title, or credit information), you'll not want to do the Find and Replace operation described in the previous paragraph. Instead, follow these general steps:

1. Make sure that all the images you want to insert are in their own folder.
2. Create a brand-new Word document.
3. Immediately format the paragraph so that Word automatically inserts a page break before it. (Display the Home tab of the ribbon | click the small icon at the bottom-right of the Paragraph group | Line and Page Breaks tab | Page Break Before.)
4. Choose to insert a graphic. Word displays an insertion dialog box that looks very much like a standard Open dialog box.
5. Navigate to the folder that contains the images.
6. Select all the images by clicking on the first image and then holding down the Shift key as you click on the last image. (An alternative way to do this is to click on any image and then press Ctrl+A. This selects all the images.)
7. Click Insert. Word inserts all the images in the document.
8. Press Ctrl+H to display the Replace tab of the Find and Replace dialog box.
9. In the Find What box enter ^g.
10. In the Replace With box enter ^&^p.
11. Click Replace All.

At this point each graphic is on its own page and each one is also on its own paragraph. This means that you can go to the end of each paragraph that has a graphic, press Shift+Enter, and then type the text that you want to see below the paragraph.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (9625) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Placing Many Graphics in a Document.