Large file size when adding pictures.

In the laboratory where I work, we have built our worksheets in Excel.

Part of our documentation is to photograph the items we are examining, and we then drop these pictures into our Excel worksheets.

The problem we are having, however, is when we drop a small file size jpg image (approximately 200 KB) into our worksheet, this increases the file size of the worksheet by somewhere on the order of 4500 KB. It is giving the folks who maintain our servers fits because even the most basic laboratory notes end up using between 50-80 MB.

I'm personally Excel stupid and the guy who knew what he was doing and built our worksheets no longer works for us. So I'm hoping someone here can give me some suggestions, or at least a place to start.

Thanks!

Unless I have Excel in Design Mode, right clicking does nothing. In design mode, it gives an option for "Format Control", but this doesn't give me an option to change resolution anywhere.

If I check the properties of the picture box while in design mode, it tells me the picture is a Bitmap image, even though the image I'm inserting is a jpeg. I know bitmaps usually are larger files than jpegs, so this may have something to do with it. But I don't see anywhere I can change that.

As I said in my last post, right clicking on the picture itself does absolutely nothing. It does not bring up a drop down menu or anything that allows me to select "Format Picture".

To clarify, these pictures are not put in the worksheet using the "Insert" tab on the top toolbar (which does allow you to right click the picture and select the "Format picture" icon).

We have an image box drawn into the worksheet using the image tool from the "Control toolbox" toolbar (which is also where you can get into the "Design Mode"). We insert the pictures directly into these boxes as we fill in our worksheets. However, these image boxes seem to default the images to a BITMAP instead of the JPG, which I'm guessing is why the file sizes get so huge. I'm just trying to figure out if this can be changed.