I recently had a client who asked for some business cards using Avery Template 8371. Although the images showed up fine on my Windows 2008 for Mac saved as a .docx file, when saved as a .doc file for the clients pc version of word, the images changed to black boxes.
“Humph!” I said scratching my head. I saved them as .jpgs, high enough quality to be printed on their own office printer. What could possibly be the problem.
I did a little research and this is what I found:
Word doesn’t like .jpgs saved from a cmyk photo documents (like photoshop)
So I went back into my photoshop image, changed the image mode to rgb, resaved as a .jpg (and unchecked the “embed color profile”. I then reinserted the images into the word document and VOILA it looked and saved just fine.
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faisal says
December 11, 2009 at 10:51 amHi
Great information and the images showed up fine on my Windows 2008 for Mac saved as a docs file. When saved as a .doc file for the clients pc version of word, the images changed to black boxes.
James Parker.
Web design Company
Debbie says
December 11, 2009 at 2:10 pmI have used these instructions and it worked coming from my mac word 2008 doc to my mac xp 2003 word doc and also to a pc running xp word 2003. What version of word/pc is your client using and I'll check it out for you.
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Elizabeth Johanna says
January 1, 2013 at 11:50 amYour tip really helped me. Thank you so much for putting your tip up on your site. I was finishing the formatting on a book in Word for a friend. I do not like Word, much preferring to use a design program like InDesign, so when Word crashed and black boxes appeared in place of the images I was not pleased at all. Your tip solved the problem. The book has gone through a slew of different versions of Word so your tip made sense. Again, many thanks!
Gene Elizondo says
August 13, 2015 at 5:43 pmSome images have a transparent background so when opening them, you see nothing but “black boxes”. Try saving those images as PNG and then opening them using a software that can handle transparent background.
Catie B says
December 31, 2015 at 3:21 pmThank you SO much! I have been so frustrated with Word’s inability to print JPEGs and having to essentially start all over and build my images in Word rather than in Illustrator. This made my day, thank you so very much!!
Jayne Roden says
November 10, 2016 at 12:34 pmGot rid of my black box, thank you so much
Jen says
January 15, 2017 at 6:26 pmThank you, thank you, thank you.
Debbie says
January 30, 2017 at 8:58 amYou are most welcome!
Terry says
March 21, 2017 at 3:20 amI kinda get all of your comments apart form the fact that the problem is occuring with my document header whaich I have never had any problem printing in the past
Debbie says
March 23, 2017 at 9:40 amDocument header of your MS Word document?