Barbara Shaw -

I'm afraid the "compress" utility must have been added after Word97. (I had forgotten that Word97 came out when they were pushing the .wmf filetype that was supposed to make everything automatic.)

There's little harm in not having, or in not using, this feature. The only result is a slight increase in the size of the Word file over what might be obtained with compression.

It does appear that in Word97 the "picture edit" functions are more closely "tied into" the "Draw" utility than in later version. You might find some functions there that would be helpful if you really need to do some minor editing of a screen print; but most of what you're likely to need is right on the Picture toolbar. (You may also run into a tendency for Word to open Draw and convert your image to a "Draw Object" when you double click the image. I do remember doing a lot of cursing over that "feature.") It's been far too long since I've used Word97 on any regular basis for me to advise on details there.

If you're going to do a significant amount of work with images, you really should get some kind of separate image editing program, so that you can crop, touch up, add labels, adjust color, and save/convert various file types for different uses - and do all the editing in a program that makes image work "easy" before you past into Word. There are quite a few good programs available, and for most purposes it doesn't make a lot of difference which you choose. My personal favorite (at the moment) is "Photoshop Elements 2.0." (details and enthusiasm on request.) Although it lists for $69+, I've never seen it for sale without the "$30 rebate," so the net cost is about what you'd pay for many shareware programs (assuming you license them).

If you have something that looks, and prints, ok with your screen shot paste and crop, I wouldn't worry about not finding the "compress" feature, since it does seem to be something added in later versions.

My recollection is that Word97 did a fairly good job on resizing, although I can't say whether it's as good as in newer Word versions (which really do a very good job on re-sizes).

In newer versions, you have a "revert" button that, until you compress, allows you to go back to the original image that you pasted. This means that the original picture, and the one you cropped and resized, are both contained in the Word file until you "compress." Compression not only coverts the pasted-cropped-resized picture to a default bit-spacing, it also throws away the copy of the original picture. Word97 may not save the original(?) in the Word file, which would make it much less "necessary" to clean up.

John