My first question!
I have discovered the joys if hyperlinking scanned PDF and JPG documents and files into my Excel (Office 2007) spreadsheets.
Is there a way to show the image, (even a thumbnail would do), instead of the text of the hyperlink code in the cell?
Or is there a way of inserting the image itself instead of a hyperlink to the file, so that when I sort my records the image stays with that exact cell?
Sorry - 2 questions about a similar problem for me!
Thanks, Woody.
The answer to your questions is that yes you can do all this. Ignoring the thumbnail issue for now, let’s consider the image question. If you have an Excel worksheet, you can enlarge the cell big enough to fit an image by enlarging the column width and row height – you will need the images to fit inside the cell so make them a bit larger than the images will be. Now you can place the image in the cell sizing it so that it sits within the cell boundaries. To do this, choose Insert > Picture and add an image. Then right click the image and choose Format Picture > Properties. For the picture you need to set the Object Positioning to "Move but don’t size with cells". This will ensure that the image is fixed inside the cell and, if you make the cell bigger or smaller, the image size won’t scale out of proportion.
Now, for example, if you have text in cells to the right or left of the cell with an image in it you can use the Sort & Filter button on the Home tab of the ribbon to sort the range – the images will stay fixed in their cells so they will be sorted with the adjacent data – of course, if this is not the desired result, you need to make your sort range smaller to leave the columns of images out of the sort. It really depends on the result that you want, the point being that the images can be sorted with the data, if desired.
To add a hyperlink to an image, right click the image and choose Hyperlink. You can now hyperlink the image to anything that you can hyperlink to such as an existing file or web page, a place in the worksheet, a new document, an email address, a file, whatever it is that you want to hyperlink to.
The final issue is the one of thumbnails. To get thumbnails you’ll have to create them yourself. For images that you have in an Excel worksheet you do this by sizing the image to thumbnail sizes then, when you’re done, right click the image and choose Picture Tools > Format Tab and click the Compress Pictures. In the dialog, deselect 'Apply only to this picture' as you’ll probably want to compress all the pictures in your Excel file. You can select 'Delete cropped areas of pictures' if you have cropped anything from the images. You can then choose either Print, Screen, Email Resolution or Document Resolution – if you typically use this worksheet on a computer then screen resolution is all that you will need. Click that and click Ok and all the images in the document will be compressed so that they take up only a fraction of their original size. This will be important particularly if you’re adding very large images to the Excel workbook then sizing them very small as you don't want your Excel file size to blow out of control. Sizing the images in the file will have no effect on the original images.
The biggest issue you’ll have is with thumbnails of your PDF files as you will need to make images of these to use. To do this, open a folder of files in Windows Explorer and click the Print Screen button. Paste the image into your favorite photo editing tool, and then cut out the individual thumbnails and save them as image files on your computer. You can then add them to your Excel worksheet using Insert > Picture just like any other image and hyperlink the image back to the original .pdf file. Just how fussy you’ll be in terms of creating thumbnail images for PDF files depends on how often you use the worksheet. If this is a worksheet that you use every day then spending the extra time creating thumbnail for PDF files makes good sense.
Thanks very much Helen,
Yes the spreadsheet will be referred to often as it's used as a sort of database to manage and track items that have been repaired.
The spreadsheet itself shows the history and work carried out with costs involved while the linked images are the scans of the technicians worksheet and then the actual invoice received (either via email or scanned in).
I can then keep the details on the spreadsheet to a minimum and let the linked images explain more details.
Again thank you for the reply,
Woody.
PS - Now if we can just get your forum to have a spell checker!?