How to disable image compression in Office 365
Office 365 has one publishing app. The other apps in the productivity suite are for creating documents/spreadsheets/presentations/etc., that will be viewed on normal screens, and printed for ordinary use. These files are likely to be shared so it stands to reason that images used in them will be compressed so that the file size isn’t too big. The end result gives you images that are visually fine and easy to make out, and files that aren’t too big to be shared or emailed. That said, you can disable image compression in Office 365 if you need high quality images to be used within a file.
Image compression can be disabled on a per-file basis or for all files. If you choose to disable it for all files, you will still have to disable it on a per-app basis. If you, for example, disable image compression for all Word documents, it will still be enabled for all Excel sheets. You must disable it separately in Excel.
Disable image compression in Office 365
Since image compression is applied on a per-file basis, open the file that you’d like to disable it for. Go to File>Options.
Select the Advanced tab. Scroll down to the ‘Image size and quality section’. It’s here that you need to decide if you want to disable image compression for just the current file or for all files that you create in the future.
If you only want to disable compression for the current file, check the ‘Do not compress images in file’ option. You can alternatively open the dropdown under this option and select a compression level. This will allow you to have better quality images in the file but still exert some control over the size of the document.
If you want to disable image compression for all future documents, open the document name dropdown and select the ‘All new documents’ option. Select the ‘Do not compress images in file’ option and click OK.
This setting will only be applied to images that are inserted after you change it. The images that have already been added to a document have been compressed and it isn’t possible to upgrade their quality unless you’re willing to remove and insert the images all over again.
We’ve demonstrated how you can disable image compression in Word but the process is going to be the same for all other apps in Office 365. You will have the choice to disable it for just the current document, or for all documents. Remember that with image compression disabled, your file size could increase significantly. It’s a good idea to see if you can optimize an image before you insert it into a file.
