pictures created in word 2003 are blacked out when opened in 2007

D

Denise

The pictures/graphics in my documents that were created in Word 2003 are
blacked out when I open the file in Word 2007.
 
M

Maurice

A friend of mine called me yesterday with the same problem. He is a college
lecturer and has masses of documents created over the years in Word 2000 then
2003 in normal .DOC format with embedded images. His college is updating to
Office 2007 soon so he has updated to it on his machine. When he opens one of
his stock of documents in Word 2007 the images are blacked out.


I have suggested he try opening them in Word 2003 that has the Word 2007
fileconverter installed and to save some as .docx to see if that clears it.

But does anyone know why Word 2007 opeing a Word 2003 doc should show the
images as black rectangles?
 
M

Maurice

Hi, can I take it from the deathly silence that nobody else has encountered
this problem?

Any suggestion greatly appreciated.
 
S

Suzanne S. Barnhill

I think if you google this you'll find numerous folks have encountered it.
There may even be some solutions, but the silence may mean that no one has
the answer.

There's a long thread at
http://help.wugnet.com/office/Word-2003-docs-images-display-black-box-2007-ftopict1065759.html
that might give you some ideas. I see several threads suggesting that this
problem is associated with PostSript printers.

To clarify, though, are the pictures displayed as black rectangles in Print
Preview? Do they print black?
 
M

Maurice

Hi thanks for the pointer to the wugnet thread. I am not sure what happens
when they are printed. It's a friend who has the problem and he is 300 miles
away but I'll call and check
a) is the printer set as PS rather than PCL
b) how does it look when printed.

cheers
 
C

Clipo

I have the same problem. The images show as black boxes in Word 2007. They
were fine in Word 2003. They are also fine in Word 2004 for the Mac (but not
2008). The images are sometimes shown as half-present with the other half
blacked out. When I print the document (on any printer) they print black. I
can click on the image and then "save as image" -- and the file that results
is also blacked out regardless of the format.

The odd thing is not all images do this -- only some. Many are just fine and
all were created in the same way (usually scanned from within word using a
flatbed scanner). This problem drives me crazy since it means I have to go an
recreate all of those images.

I havent found any obvious solution anywhere despite looking. Any ideas
would be really helpful.
 
M

Mark

mmm... not a printer related issue. The same images display and print ok
using Word 2003 or Word 2004 for Mac. But show up as black boxes in Word
2007 or Word 2008 for Mac. So I'm guessing it might be tied with the XML
file format or just the way the new version of Word reads image data.

I've tried opening a file in Word 2003 and using the picture compression
(which was suggested in one forum discussion), but that didn't help. Opening
the file with Word 2003 with the Compatibility Pack add-in installed and
resaving the file into another DOC or DOCX file didn't help either.

The only thing that did work was to open the file in Word 2003, copy the
problem image into a drawing program, save the image into a graphic file
(JPEG), and then re-insert the image into the Word document (I did it in Word
2003 and then when I opened it in Word 2007, it worked).
 
Z

Zarniwoop

Word 2007 has a bug opening some pictures from Word 2003 and earlier
documents. Until Microsoft releases an official fix for this, here is a
workaround for pictures opening as black boxes.

1. Using Word 2003, open the document containing pictures so they display
correctly.

2. Right click a picture in the document, then click Format Picture.

3. Click Compress in the lower-left corner of the Picture tab.

4. Check "All pictures in document" , "No Change" , and "Delete cropped
areas of pictures" , and uncheck "Compress pictures".

WARNING: This will delete the extra (unseen) portion of any "cropped"
pictures.
Retain a backup copy of the original document in the event you may need to
adjust "cropped" image boundaries in the future. If this behavior is
undesired, or if any images are still not fixed in Word 2007, you may try
instead checking "Compress pictures", and unchecking "Delete cropped areas of
pictures". If that still fails, the only other known fix is copying and
pasting the images into a graphic editing program, saving them, and then
re-inserting them back into the document.

5. Click File, Save As, and save the file with a revised name. All pictures
in the document should now open correctly in Word 2007.

6. Confirm that the resulting file's pictures open correctly in Word 2007.
 

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