If you are using the Summary > Preference option to merge images in fields marked for summary along with the comments into a final summary document, you may wonder why images may not be positioned alongside text or alongside each other.

This is because the merged images are treated like individual text-like characters in a regular document.  This means they move along with other text and fall in line with other characters in a single line of text.  Thus they cannot wrap separately or alongside multiple characters of other text in the document on their own (whereas the special "below", "right", or "left" image positioning in a report body uses special formatting by means of table cells to achieve that look at print or preview time).   However there is a trick you could use along with a little manual work to position images alongside text where desired in your final summary document.

You may place an image side by side text or another image by inserting a table first so that the image can be placed in one column and your text in the other as needed, or another image in the other column as needed.  For instance to place two images (or an image alongside a paragraph of text), use Insert > Table and insert a 2 column, 1 row table.  You might insert such a table where your multiple images are located, and set the number of cells in the row to the number of images.  If you wanted 4 images side by side, you might insert a 4 column table.  If you instead wish to move related text to print alongside the image you may enter or copy and paste your text as desired in one table cell.  In the case of images just drag your images into the desired cells.  You may resize images using the mouse, and you may adjust the table divider to easily reposition your image in each cell horizontally where you want it.  The table lines themselves won't print unless you set them to using Format > Table.

 

Now if you frequently move images to simply print alongside text in a final summary document, you could also adjust your master summary document to help with the manual adjustments later.  In your summary template, you could insert a table with a couple columns.  Then in one of the columns you'd include the summary merge field.  That way, when your final summary document is created and merged, all the summary information ends up in that table cell.  Afterward, you could drag or cut and paste the images from the first column to the 2nd column.  You'd probably need to add some blank lines between your comments or images by pressing Enter if you want the related comments to line up with the images dragged to the other side.  If you want to play with this method, you'd probably want to do a few test runs to get your columns set up the way you want in your master template.

Alternatively to simplify and reduce paper usage even further, it may be better not to include images in your summary merge at all.  You may use the report writer Summary > Preference option to turn that option off.  After all, a summary generally would be only a brief outline of important items you want your client to read in entirety in the main report- thus you likely would prefer they read the entire main report or refer back to the applicable sections mentioned in the summary anyway.  So only including images once in the main report is a great way to do that, while at the same time saving even more space on the combined report and summary.

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