Embedding images in OpenOffice text documents

Whenever I copy and paste some content (text with images) from a web page into a OpenOffice text file (.odt), I notice that the OpenOffice writer application doesn’t respond for few seconds. I understand that it takes time to fetch/load/render the images that are part of the copied content in the document and it’s the same with other office applications like MS Word.

But what I find really frustrating is that having done so (copy+paste+save), it still tries to access the images online everytime I scroll through the document. As a result of which the OpenOffice writer application becomes slow and does not respond for few seconds. Moreover, the images don’t get displayed and I get a “Read-Error”, if I open the document when I’m not connected to the Internet.

The problem in the above case is that OpenOffice stores only the “link” to the online image and not the image itself. So everytime you open the document, the text content gets loaded and the application tries to access the image resource online.

(Select an image, right-click and select Picture to see the link details.)

Now, this is bound to put off any avid MS Word user as the behaviour they are used to is that images get embedded as part of the document itself.

Well after hours of tweaking here and there, I found out that OpenOffice actually allows both linking as well as embedding images in a text document, the former being the default behaviour. So, if you have a document that works with images as links to online resources and you would like to embed them instead, just do the following:

(Go to the menubar and select Edit -> Links)
The “Edit Links” Dialog gets displayed that shows all the links (mostly images/graphics) in the current document.

Now select the links to the images you want to embed and click the “Break Link” button.

To check if the images are embedded parts of the document and not links.
(Select an image, right-click and select Picture)

• Technical