Word 2003 Cropping Conundrum

[Rebecca]

In MS Word 2003, when I crop various images in a file (to remove the dark
margins that resulted when I scanned pages of books), the size of the file
increases, though logically it should decrease. Any MS image file experts
out there who could explain this bizarre behavior?

 

[Jezebel]

Cropping within Word doesn't actually discard any information: it just tells
Word not to display part of the graphic (you can go back and un-crop). On
top of which, most graphic manipulations in Word tend to result in larger
files.

As a general principle, prepare the graphic in a graphics application
first -- crop, size, and set the resolution --- then save to disk and import
that file into Word.