KennethCohen

Includepicture field

My problem is similar to some of the other discussions of the Includepicture field (which I've fiddled with hopelessly), but I think (hope) the answer is simpler.

I store hundreds of templates in a My Templates folder in the "Shared User". My two assistants access these templates regularly.

We have a standard picture that we use in our letterhead. I have many different templates that use it. But whenever a piece of text on it changes (a phone number for instance), we have to copy/paste the new picture into all of the templates - dozens of them.

Is there a way to create the the picture in one central Word file, and then put a link to that picture in every template? The idea is that if the picture changes, then files created from each linked template after the change is made will contain the changed picture (while old stored files created from these templates before the change will retain the old picture).

I'd very much appreciate it if anyone can help with this. Thanks in advance.

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Answer

Daniel G. Grau

This is how you go about it:

Open the document (could be a template)
Select Insert > Photo > Picture from file
Locate the file and click on Link to file
Save

From that point on, if the picture is changed, the image on the file (or template, or document based on that template) will also change, as long as the image file remains in the same location and has the same name.

There is a second choice in that dialog box: Save with document. The way this operates is:

If the original image file changes, so does the image in the document (as before)
If the image cannot be located, you still get the last image inserted (kind of "for lack of a better choice"). This is what you would use for sending the document to a recipient not in your network.
If Save with document is not selected, and the image cannot be located, you get an informational message with a red X.

Note that with this method (Insert > Photo > Picture from file) if you open an old document, there's no way of telling what image it originally had, as Word will always try to update it.

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Once you understand the above method and what the two checkmarks do (Link to file and Save with document), it'll be a lot easier to understand how the INCLUDEPICTURE field works, since there is a correspondence.

So here's a similar method that allows file-independence through "unlinking" but it's more laborious:

Do Insert > Field and select INCLUDEPICTURE
Type the path to the file in the dialog box. For instance: "/Users/daniel/1.jpg."
Your field should look like this: { INCLUDEPICTURE "/Users/daniel/1.jpg" }
Adding the "\d" switch, as in { INCLUDEPICTURE "/Users/daniel/1.jpg" \d }, makes the field act as "Do not save with document" (the opposite of the checkmark effect mentioned above). Thus, the picture will show whenever the original is not available.
Alternate between viewing the picture and its field code with Option F9 (or Fn Option F9, depending on your System Preferences regarding F keys).

Now, to obtain an unchanging testimonial document (i.e., showing what was actually in it when you prepared it), you'd need to select the picture and unlink it (Command Shift F9, perhaps adding Fn). From that point on, the document becomes totally independent from the original picture. In fact, the document will act just as if you'd manually pasted the picture, and the picture will stay put, no matter what.

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Includepicture field

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