Change Picture In Offline Mode

Question

_{Thursday, November 21, 2013 2:26 AM | 1 vote}

Hi All,

I've found that in Word 2013 Change Picture insists on having Internet access. And it's a pain, there are many reasons why we do not want Word charging off to the Internet at the merest hint of a request.

To test, try creating a document and populating it with a jpeg (or similar) from a local source.

Use Change Picture and see the result. You have to dive down to the Work Offline to get a local image.

Then try Unchecking the "Allow Office to connect to the Internet", under Options -> Trust Center -> Trust center Settings -> Privacy Options.

Repeat, this time you get a pop up saying this feature needs the Internet.

Now, MS and others may think that the Internet and Cloud is the be all and end all, but why forcing a feature such as Change Picture needs the Internet is beyond me.

Has anyone found a way to make this behave a bit more rationally?

All replies (3)

_{Saturday, November 23, 2013 3:13 PM ✅Answered | 1 vote}

Hi,

Do you mean you get the following error in the screenshot?

I think the Change Picture button is used for online pictures, and it needs an internet connection. If you are connecting to an internet, you will get the following window and you can select “From a file” to insert a local picture. See:

Usually, to change a local picture, we just delete the old one and insert a new one. 

Steve Fan
TechNet Community Support

_{Thursday, January 8, 2015 12:14 PM | 1 vote}

     Do you mean you get the following error in the screenshot?

That's not the same as the error I get:



Note: there is no "Work offline" option in Office 2013. Maybe there was once, but has been removed?

       I think the **Change Picture **button is used for online pictures, and it needs an internet connection.

I think you're correct in that someone in Microsoft thinks this is the right way to go. I think that preventing the rest of us from working offline permanently is absolutely the wrong decision by Microsoft R&D. For someone writing and updating business specifications, updating and inserting screenshots from the web is almost never desirable.

_{Tuesday, May 17, 2016 5:04 PM}

I agree, I'm having this same problem. I want to swap out pictures from my machine, not the internet. When I choose Change, for a split second a screen pops up asking if I want to work offline or something, but then it goes straight to the internet option. At work, we have internet protection software which is not working correctly within this Change tool so I can't even connect to the internet. So I have to completely remove the picture and add anew, which defaults to certain picture settings, so I have to redo that. This is ridiculous.