Good question. I have edited and saved my WORD files with the photo embedded, many times. Some pictures seem OK, and other seem to degrade. I really do not know why.

I have been experimenting all week. First I used the .tif format. Big mistake. The files are so large that they totally bogged down Excel. ALso when you import into WORD, it does not give you a choice of a .tif. I copy photos to Excel and to WORD and honestly their whole set-up is designed to use jpg files. What I did discover is that you do not have to accept the default compression. My Cannon photo program allows you to specify a "0" compression for jpg files. Picture-It allows a lowest of 1% compression (it defaults to 10%). So now I have been using these options for less or no compression.

Also, it seems to me that if I add text using Picture-It the photo degrades quite a bit, whereas, if I import it into Excel and use the Excel drawing package, and then copy as a "picture" to WORD, there is less degradition.

Another problem, I think what you see on the screen is not what you get. My impression is that displaying photos takes up a lot of RAM storage and everything gets fuzzy if I do not turn off the computer and re-boot often.

The whole process is: 1) clean up raw photo, 2)crop, 3) save, 4) import into WORD - or sometimes to Excel and then to WORD, 5) PDF and 6) print. There are a lot of PDF options that I have no idea about either. This is another level of complexity. My real concern is what it looks like in step #6!

By the way I am using Microsoft XP - very old. Newer versions may have different options.