Wednesday, April 22, 2009

unexpected file size increase in Microsoft Word document \ Word Document Size Increase : size, word, document, increases

The quick solution to this problem is to save the document to the *.rtf format and open it and re save it to doc format.

  1. 1st doc -> test.doc (20MB) save it as test.rtf
  2. check the size of test.rtf (now the size might have gone down to 400 KB)
  3. open this test.rtf (with microsoft word) and save it as test1.doc (size will be 400 KB)

By the way microsoft Office is peace of crap just use Open office (Free, Open source and no surprise like this)

I don't have any other quick solution then this but If you have found one then add your comment. I have found this problem with word 2003. In case you have the same problem but diffrent version then just report it as a comment. Thanks...

- Mihir Patel

10 comments:

Mihir said...

just make sure this two things...

1. Fast Saves: Disable this at on the Save tab of Tools | Options.

2. Preview Picture: Clear the check box on the Summary tab of File |
Properties.

Anonymous said...

Microsoft Office is peace of scrap and you also have to pay to use it !!

Open Office is the way to go

http://www.openoffice.org/

Anonymous said...

File/Versions, clear the check box at the top and delete all the
versions inside the box one-by-one.

reopen the document to get rid of all the versions.

Mihir said...

There weren't any versions.

The version box wasn't ticked and there wasn't any history saved.

Mihir said...

Thanks for help.

This is a paid license program. i can see it converting the file to text ok. but i can't save the file as .doc* as i haven't bought it thus i can't confirm that it works. ( it would be good to have at lease one file allowed to be created on the first installation on the system.

- Mihir

Alex said...

I have known one tool, which blinded me. It worked out my old troubles for seconds and may help in any issue as I know - microsoft word recovery tool.

Anonymous said...

Thank you very much for this wonderful solution how to reduce unexpected size of a word file (I mean save as rtf and than back to doc format). I was working on a report and the size of that file rose to 118MB!! I still don't understand how it could happen, it had only about 50 pages. By using this procedure I was able to reduce size to 1.78MB, which was perfectly OK.
Thanks a lot again!
Daniel

Anonymous said...

Many thanks for posting this! I’ve been panicking trying to figure out why removing a small table was increasing the doc size to over 10 megs. Any who, tried your trick and worked like a charm and the original formatting didn’t break.

Anonymous said...

I use Office 2003 and found a solution to my issue. I had inserted a couple of embedded files (totalling about 1 MB Each) into the doc, which should have put it in the 4 mb range but it skyrocketed to 28mb. If your file increased in size by orders of magnitude, like mine did here is the solution that worked for me.

File > Save As > select *.docx from the file types list. My file went back down to the expected 4MB.

Anonymous said...

You can try this tool to control where bytes are hidden in your MS Word file
http://docexplore.free.fr/analyse_en.php