How to get images to display in draft layout?

I didn't think you could get any images to display in draft view, so you are farther ahead than I thought possible.

And now we are even farther ahead. ;-) I just discovered another way to insert images into a .docx document that will display in draft mode. In the process, I learned a few things about imbedded (OLE) objects that are pretty cool.

First, let's insert an image from Excel:

• Open a new Word (.docx) document and go to Draft view or Normal mode (Alt+Ctrl+N).
• Set Field shading to "Always". (Alt+f, i, click "Advanced, scroll down to the Show document content (third) section, set Field shading setting to "Always". This is not necessary, but is helpful below.
• In Excel, create a little table with some simple calculations. For instance, put the even numbers (2, 4, 6, 8, 10) in cells B2:F2 and the odd numbers (1, 3, 5, 7, 9) in cells A2:A6. In B2, put "=$A2+B$1", then copy down and across. You should have a little 6x6 table with the sums in the interior cells. Add some formatting if you like.
• Select the table (A1:F6) and copy it to the clipboard (Ctrl+c).
• In Word, paste it into the document using paste special (Alt+Ctrl+v).
• This will bring up the Paste Special dialog box. Select Microsoft Office Excel Worksheet Object (m).
• Make sure that the Display as icon check box is not checked.
• Click OK. The image should be visible in the document just like is it in Excel including any formatting. If you have Field shading set to "Always", it will also have the grey background of a field. Interestingly, the grey background does not display when Field Shading is set to "When selected" even when selected, at least on my machine.
• Select the image. It will have square black handles.
• Press Ctrl+Shift+F9 to convert the image from an Excel object to a plain image. The grey background will disappear, but the image should remain visible in both Normal and Page mode.

Now let's look at what is happening when an object is pasted in this manner and what some of the cool things that you can do are.

It appears that pasting objects in this way makes them "OLE" (Object Linking and Embedding) objects that have some sort of link to the mother application. They do not appear to be linked to the source object, just the application. That is, many of the operations that you could do on the object in the mother application are available right in the Word document, but this does not affect the source object in Excel. Similarly, any changes made to the source object in Excel after the object is pasted, do not appear to be propagated. At least, I couldn't get that to work.

This capability is ended when they are converted to a plain image using Ctrl+Shift+F9 as described in the last step above. The rest of this discussion assumes that you have not done this and they are still active objects. If not, re-paste them or these next steps will not work.

There are two ways to do this: (1) in Word and (2) in Excel.

In Word. If you double-click the object, it will "open" for editing in a mini version of the mother application (Excel) right there in the Word document. It will look like a little spreadsheet. It appears to be a skeleton version of Excel, but you can change the values in the cells and any calculations will be updated. You can change the calculations. For instance, if can change the code in B2 from a sum to a product (=$A2*B$1) then copy down and across, you will have a product table.

To end the edit session, click anywhere outside the object or press Esc.

The source object in the mother application is not affected. This means that you could paste several copies of the object and edit them to compare results. When you have them the way you want them, use Ctrl+Shift+F9 to fix them.

Changes to the source object in Excel do not affect the copy in word. If you want the changes, you will need to redo the copy and paste.

Double-clicking the object achieves the same result as right-clicking the object and selecting Worksheet Object | Edit.

In Excel. The other method is to open the object in a full-fledged instance of Excel. Now you will have all of the capabilities of Excel and any changes will be reflected back to the object in Word.

Visio. This explains what is going on with my Visio method. It just happens by default with Visio, whereas with excel, I need to explicitly choose it. That is, the default paste option for Excel 2007 seems to be "HTML", whereas the default paste option for Visio (at least Visio 2003, which is what I have) is Microsoft Visio Drawing Object (OLE). If I use Ctrl+v, I get the OLE object. If I use Atl+Ctrl+v and select any other option, I don't get an OLE object and it is not visible in Normal view.

The cool thing that I didn't know until today, is that, like Excel OLE objects, Visio objects can be edited right in Word or I can open up a full-fledged instance of Visio and edit the object there as long as I leave the OLE link in place.

So not I am even more disgusted with Microsoft. It is clearly not true that images cannot be displayed in Normal view. They have just gone out of their way to make it difficult. Why would they treat their customers like that? This is not the behavior of a caring organization.

Like you, I deplore the reduction in utility of Draft view in Word 2007 and above compared to Normal view in Word 2003 and earlier. One of my earliest unpleasant surprises was to find that Draft view doesn't reflect the application of character spacing (Condensed) to text. It just isn't as WYSIWYG as Normal view.

 

That said, you can get a lot of the advantages of Draft/Normal view by using Print Layout view with white space hidden. This gives you the same continuous text stream (without interruption by headers, footers, and page breaks) that you get in Draft view, but you retain the WYSIWYGness of Print Layout view. Since, even in earlier versions, you can't actually place wrapped graphics accurately in Normal view, using Print Layout is ultimately more efficient, anyway.

OK, I'll give it a try. And I still have my little trick of pasting images from Visio. Although, now that I've brought it to their attention, they'll probably plug that hole.

When you say "white space hidden", do you mean something more than just double-clicking in the page gap to hide the headers & footers?

There used to be a "mode" in page view that would suppress the left and right margins, too. They seem to have taken that away as well.

Clearly we aren't going to change Microsoft. It took IBM 40-50 years to become fully ossified. Microsoft has done it in less than half that time. So I guess it is still good at something. ;-) We may be saved by pressure from OpenOffice.

Well, if it's document corruption, it's been that way in every document I have that contains images for at least 6-7 years, including brand new documents. I have been pasting images into Word via Visio for a very long time.

In any case, you have the document. Isn't there some way to detect corruption and even repair it?

What I really want to know, as indicated in the thread title, is how I can get images to display in draft layout. I usually work in draft layout and it is a royal pain not be able to see the actual content in my documents.

It would appear that your document is in .doc format. In a .docx document, images are not displayed in Draft view under any circumstances, but in .doc documents, inline images (that is, those with text wrapping set to In Line with Text) and images in frames are displayed in Draft view. Images with any other wrapping style and images in text boxes (or text boxes containing text, for that matter) are not displayed in Draft view. This behavior is unchanged from earlier versions (you'd see the same result in Word 2003).

In .doc-format documents, square black handles indicate an inline image; round white handles indicate a "wrapped" graphic.

I'm not sure what you mean by "it would appear" to be in .doc format. Did you look at the document I uploaded? The file extension is ".docx". And just to be sure, I saved it again as a Word (not Word 97-2003) document. And it behaves exactly the same way. As a second check, I checked the document properties, which say that it is a "Microsoft Office Word document". As a third check, I saved it as a Word 97-2003 (.doc) document and checked the properties of that document. Sure enough, it says that that one is a "Microsoft Office Word 97-2003 document". I have uploaded the .doc version to the same DropBox folder.

So it "appears" that my document is not a ".doc" document and images are displayed in draft layout under some circumstances.

If I right-click the second image, the one with the round handles (Actually, the corner handles are round. The side handles are square and both are "white" or hollow.), then select the Text Wrapping option, it shows that it is set to "In Line with Text", not "Wrapped".

If I right-click the first image, the one with the square handles (which look more grey than black to me), there is no Text Wrapping option. There is a Format Picture option, which pops up a panel with several tabs. one of which is Layout. Clicking that tab, I get a few Wrapping Style options, but not as many as with the second image. This image is also set to "In Line with Text".

As you have noted the two images (in the docx version) are not the same. The first is png format, the second jpg and they are inserted differently. This may have something to do with the use of the paste from Visio for I don't see how you could have created it that way otherwise. Even if you copy the first image and paste back into the document it will appear as the second. My guess is a minor document corruption related to the first image, but it is a guess.

If you use SaveAs and save as Word 97-2003 format, both images use the old doc image format and will both appear as the first image. If you then SaveAs again using docx format, the docx method of graphic handling is adopted and both will have the characteristics of the second image.