Resizing and Reshaping Your Pictures

Pictures rarely fit where they're first placed. Either they're so large that they take over the entire worksheet, or they're too small to make any impression at all. Changing the size of an image is a fairly standard operation. When you click the picture, squares or circles (called handles ) surround it, as shown in Figure 9.5.

Figure 9.5. You can quickly resize and reshape an image.

You can drag the handles to change the size and dimensions of the image as follows :

• Drag a top or bottom handle (not in the corner) to make the picture taller or shorter.

• Drag a side handle (not in the corner) to make the picture thinner or wider.

• Drag a corner handle to change both the height and width proportionally.

• If the image has a green circle handle floating above it, drag the green handle to spin the image around its center point.

• Hold down the Ctrl key while dragging to increase or decrease the size from the center out. If you hold down the Ctrl key while dragging a handle out on the right side, for example, the picture gets wider on both the left and right sides. (If you hold down the Ctrl key while dragging the image itself, instead of one of its handles, you create a copy of the image instead of resizing it.)

For more control over the size and dimensions of an image, right-click the image, click Format Picture (or Format Object , where Object is the name of the selected object), and click the Size tab. This page of options enables you to enter specific measurements for your picture. (The Size tab also has an option called Lock Aspect Ratio, which is on by default. This feature ensures that when you change the height or width of a picture, the corresponding dimension is resized proportionally.)