Changing Image Size in Word

Since it's Wednesday, it's time for a Word post.

In versions of Word before Word 2013, the fastest way to resize a picture (such as a screen capture) to an exact size was to right-click on it and select Format Picture from the context menu. That opened a dialog box with options to resize the picture, either by absolute value or by scaling by percentage, and would allow you maintain the aspect ratio (the ratio of width to height). In other words, you could change the width and the height would change to match so you didn’t distort the image.

In Word 2013, if you right-click on a picture and select Format Picture, it opens a sidebar with various options, one of which is Crop.

Changing size in that sidebar will not maintain the aspect ratio. Instead, you want to select Size and Position from the context menu. That opens the original Layout dialog box which lets you keep the aspect ratio intact as well as adjusting the position of the graphic on the page.

Just to make things even more confusing, when you select an image, a Picture Tools Format tab opens in the ribbon. 

 

That has fields for adjusting the image size, and they do maintain aspect ratio; however, in the ribbon there doesn't appear to be away to turn that option off.

Of course, you can always resize the image with the sizing handles, but it's harder to get an exact size.