Hi Peter,

At http://www.lebans.com/msword.htm Stephen Lebans has a template containing
code that can extract a graphic from a document directly to either a BMP or
an EMF. The EMF format is very compact.

The macro as it is will extract only the one selected graphic, but it looks
like it could be adapted to go through a whole document, extracting each
graphic to an EMF in a temp folder and then inserting that file to replace
the original. I'll try to find some time to tinker with it.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org

PeterK wrote:
I've been presented with 20 Word files (over 21Mb) where the author
has inserted screenshots using alt + prt scn and ctrl + v. I
estimate that converting the graphics (24bit) to 8 colour (6
bit?)gif's and reducing the "bpi" will cut the document sizes down by
60+%.

So far the only method I have identified is to save each doc as an
html file, batch convert the image files to gif , perform a find and
replace of *.jpg to *.gif on the html doc and the index file , open
the html doc and save as a Word doc. The files are heavily
hyperlinked and bookmarked and indexed and I don't want to lose these
features.

Have I identified the only solution or is there a better way? - my
current method is far quicker than a cut , reformat and paste back
image by image.