81-KB jpeg became 2-MB after being inported into Excel

[moviebuff2]

Hi everyone:

Would someone please tell me how a 81-KB jpeg file became a 2-MB (almost 2500%) after it was copied and pasted into an Excel file?

I copied a JPEG file which is 81 KB and pasted it to an Excel file which was 300 KB. After that, the Excel file ballooned to +2.3 MB.

Thanks

[BJ_M]

it changes it to pic

[ahhaa]

the 81 K is when the file is closed & compressed; it would be much larger when open in an editing program. also, you probably made the spreadsheet itself much larger. & it is possible each cell contains the entire picture file in a 'rich text' mode.

console yourself, 2 megs is nothing these days!:]

[träskmannen]

How did you copy and paste it? I believe that this is the key to the issue. Either that or you have found some weird setting that Microsoft put there to annoy you...

I just made some tests with a few .jpg files and the .xls stayed nice and small, just the way it should.

[moviebuff2]

How did you copy and paste it? I believe that this is the key to the issue. Either that or you have found some weird setting that Microsoft put there to annoy you...

I just made some tests with a few .jpg files and the .xls stayed nice and small, just the way it should.

Thanks, träskmannen.

I opened the jpg file, selected, copied it in one of my Photo software. Then I simply pasted to my Excel workshhet.

Your comment reminded me of Excel's "paste special" function. I just pasted the jpg as "picture (enhanced metafile)". The resulted Excel file is now only 700KB.

Thank you, everyone for taking your time to help me.

[träskmannen]

There is still something fishy about it, even 700 kb is way too big for an Excel with nothing but a picture of 87 kb in it. I think your photo software gives an uncompressed copy. Pasting as enhanced metafile will change the compression of the photo, if you want to keep the file size you should avoid doing that.

Easiest way to make sure that the size of the photo stays the same is to open Excel, choose
Insert - Picture - From File... , browse to the correct folder and double click on the photo you want. There are other ways as well of course.

(I just made another small experiment with a 43.6 kb .jpg. Copying from Photo Editor and pasting in Excel resulted in a 1.8 Mb file, Insert-Picture-From File... resulted in a 58 kb file.)

[AlanHK]

Jpeg is (lossy) image compression. The default Windows image format is BMP, which is uncompressed -- it can easily be 100 times larger but looks exactly the same (or worse). So for some reason Excel has converted the image format.

Anyway, probably an Excel newsgroup like
http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.excel.misc/topics would be your best bet.

[BJ_M]

The default Windows image format for OFFICE applications is PIC (i think)