Displaying Thumbnails and Full-Size Images

Bob has some graphic images that he's captured in GIF format. He would like to display the image in his Word document as a small thumbnail, but then have the image display full size if someone clicks on the thumbnail.

We've seen this done on Web sites before, but not in Word documents. That doesn't mean it can't be done; it can be. Basically you just need to use the same procedure that you would use in a Web page:

1. Insert two copies of each image in your document, one full size and one thumbnail size.
2. Convert the thumbnail image into a hyperlink that points to the full-size image.

Each of the skills necessary to complete these two steps (resizing graphics, adding hyperlinks, etc.) has been covered in other issues of WordTips. The only drawback to this approach is that you end up with two copies of each graphic in your document, which means that your document can get rather large.

You could, of course, put each full-size image in its own document and only put the thumbnails in your main document. Thus, if your main document included five thumbnail graphics you would end up with six documents—the main one and five documents each containing a single large graphic. When you set up the hyperlinks on the thumbnails in the main document, they would link to the individual graphics in each of the other documents.