The easiest way to add images to your Teams docs

Have you had trouble formatting images in Word documents on Microsoft Teams? Here’s an easy fix.

The Teams version of Microsoft Word handles images quite poorly.

In the desktop version of Word, there are good options for wrapping text around images. The formatting I use most often is wrap text ‘tight’. The image floats seamlessly and the text wraps nicely around the image. It’s easy to get your text and image sitting side by side.

But in the Teams version, this option disappears. In Teams you’re left with very clunky left and right wrapping options.

The problem is, in my experience, the wrapping doesn’t work at all well. It’s almost impossible to get the image and text sitting side by side if there are paragraphs in your text. Images push text down, creating lots of white space. The bigger the image, the more white space.

Here’s what the text above looks like with an image added with ‘square right’ wrapping.

The huge vertical white space where the new paragraph starts really cuts the text up and can make documents very hard to follow. Others have encountered this issue and seem to be stumped. (For example.see this MS support item from 2020)

The fix

Fortunately there is a way to display images in Teams Word in a similar way to the desktop version: use tables.

Here’s what to do:

• Create a two column table.
• Paste your image into one cell and your text in the other.
• Remove cell borders (use the preset table design option)

This is what that text looks like now that it sits in a table beside the image.

This is the only way I’ve found to get text and image lining up side by side.

Tables are usually not the best option. They’re not  great for accessibility and come with their own formatting headaches.

But if you need to use Teams, I‘ve found tables to be better than the alternatives of ugly or hard to follow documents.

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