Cropping unwanted black borders in JPEG images

[Pierre Becquart]

I am a professional copywriter and I have to insert a lot of snapshots in
word documents. Typically 150 images in a 100 pages manual.

I have IrfanView that is repeatedly referred to as THE application to handle
snapshots before inserting them into a document. I agree it is professional
and easy to use. But opening each snapshot in IrfanView, reworking it, saving
it as JPEG and then back opening it from Word is time consuming.

I know I am using Office beyond its core functions and that there are
Publishing softwares dedicated to such jobs. But for compatibility reasons in
my business area, I have to use Word. Currently my method is to drop the full
bmp image into an empty powerpoint slide (used as workbench, very suitable
as, if necessary I can use the practical "save image as" function). I crop
and resize my snapshot until I get the desired result and then I
cut-and-paste it into my word document using the "paste as JPEG" function. A
known issue in almost all applications featuring JPEG convertors (not an
office problem as such) is that it leaves unwanted black borders of variable
width at the right side and at the bottom.

Cropping these borders is a hell of a job that I would like to avoid. Is
there any plugin software that would allow automated removal of these
borders ? I am also looking for an utility that would enabling automated
compression of all images in a document (as the function in Word is not
working for recovery reasons). This is useful for example when you want to
create a portable version of a document (lo res) next to the normal (hi res)
one.

Thanks
Pierre, from Belgium the country that could split in two or three parts soon.

 

[Pierre Becquart]

My question does not seem to ring a bell to anyone... so I have been doing
some testing myself. Actually, the real question was is IrfanView better than
Powerpoint to transfer screen snapshots into a Word document ?

I did some testing against the clock and clearly, IrfanView taht does not
have this issue of black borders scores better requiring only 25 commands
(keyboard or clicks) and 20 seconds per snapshot.

Powerpoint on the contrary requires 34 commands and 30 seconds. So it
appears that I was paying too much attention to the fact that PPT does nor
require to save the image file, wich is an advantage but all other drawbacks
are increasing the time reuqired to handle one single picture by almost 50%.
Now I have to admit that all comments on this forum that recommend IrfanView
are really founded, even it is somewhat frustarting to have to save and
insert a file you will have no use of in the future.

I have recorded my test results in a sheet available in PDF format.
I will try to attach it to my reply but I'm not sure there is such a
function in the wizard. If not drop me an email @ (e-mail address removed).