John,

Take some time to read up on PNG files. They are the stable files that keep all of the color information that GIFs were unable to do. GIFs draw from the 256 "web safe" colors, but they actually only use about 200, since there are some "reserved" colors that can be defined elsewhere (I forget how that part of it works). Anyway, bitmaps aren't easily read by most programs--many will balk when offered a bitmap. PNG is much more widely accepted now. And it doesn't need to be as large as a bitmap, though it is much larger than a compressed jpg. I try not to compress my jpg files, but it is sometimes necessary.

I find GIFs particularly useful when saving small files that I might use in several contexts that might get saved from one to the next. The most common application is in small "head shots" of local celebrities who are coming to campus to speak. Often if you visit a television or radio station to access their publicity files for various speakers, there will be GIF and JPG files to select from. Assuming there aren't a bunch of wildly contrasting colors in the studio headshot they are using for publicity, it doesn't substantially change the way photos look, but they behave better. I don't try to save complex images as GIF files. But they're great for buttons and banners and images with just a few colors.

When you're using Word you can drop in very large photos and save it to the file, and go about changing the size (dragging the corners or the edges, or opening the properties dialog box and telling it how large you want it to DISPLAY--this doesn't reduce the original size. I do the same thing with some web shots--I save it larger than it will display but I tell it what size I want it to be in my web document if I know people are going to be downloading it and will want a photo they can use in a larger format).

SRS