[Colleen]

I've done more research on this and found a few helpful hints, should anyone
else have this problem.

1. Compress the picture using the Compress command on the Picture Tools -
Format tab of the Ribbon.

2. Working in Draft view instead of Print Layout clears up the problem
completely.

3. For some reason, saving the file as a Word 97-2003 format instead of
Word 2007 format also clears up the problem completely.

Solutions #2-3 seemed to be much more important than even the size of the
graphic and the file itself.



"Colleen" wrote:

Using Word 2007. We're trying to pur our firm logo in the background of
letters we email. So, I put the logo in the header of the document. The
only problem with this is that Word is incredibly slow. The picture files
aren't too big by themselves (around 100K each, I think). If I just place
the logo behind the text (in the drawing layer) rather than in the header,
there is no slow-down whatsoever. But if I put it in the header, it slows
things way down.

I think my options may be:

1) put the images (there are 2, one for the first, and the other for 2nd
and subsequent pages) in the drawing layer. If I do this, I think I will
need to do it programmatically after the letter has been typed. Or have the
users insert it (via an AutoText entry) for each page as they're creating it.
One of things I don't like about this option is that it is sometimes hard to
select things with the mouse b/c Word tries to select the background image,
depending on where your mouse is.

2) put the images in the Header/Footer area after the letter has been
typed, so the slowdown won't matter. It would have to be the very last thing
(even after edits -- which there are often a lot of.)

Thanks for any help with this.