Help with MS Word "bloat:?

[Feline]

I have a 23 page MS word document consisting of a number of tables which is updated from time to time.

It has now become painfully large (like about 1.92Mb) and I know that a goodly part of the bloat is down to MS Word's habit of squirreling away all the things that have been deleted over a period of time.

I do know that one can get rid of all the saved history by opening it as a text document and then pasting it all into a new MS Word document. But then I'm going to lose all the tables.

Does anyone out there know of a slightly more elegant way of getting rid of the history so that I can get it down to a more manageable size and not lose the tables?

Just for reference, I'm using MS Word 2000

Thanks in anticipation ...

[RomeoTangoFoxtrotMike]

I believe that if you save your file in RTF format, you'll lose the bloat. I stand to be corrected, however

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

Feline,

If you are worried about the size of the file to where you cannot fit it on a floppy. A simple walk around is to use Winzip. It will get the file down to a more manageable size, but it will not remove any of the Bloat that MS Word put in it.

Take Care,

Richard

P.S. RomeoTangoFoxtrotMike, I try not to change the file extension in Word since I always manage to screw up the formatting. (If your solution works, that would be a good one to add to the Windows Tips Thread TCS started!)

[Memetic]

I have vague memories of fixing problems like this by switching off fast save. But having Googled for it that might be a word version or two out of date :

http://www.lookgood.demon.co.uk/txt_fastsave.html


Have you tried open office? (www.openoffice.org) download free from:

http://download.openoffice.org/index.html

I use it on my laptop and Word 2000 in the office, no problems transfering files between the two, in the current version - even track changes is compatible. Open office files are consistently much much smaller than the word equivalent.

I have just converted a document, the word file is 19k, the open office writer file is 11k. The look the same and print the same.

[RomeoTangoFoxtrotMike]

I try not to change the file extension in Word since I always manage to screw up the formatting. (If your solution works, that would be a good one to add to the Windows Tips Thread TCS started!)

Richard,

I try to avoid using Word altogether however, ISTR discovering that saving the file as RTF (Rich Text Format) removes all the extraneous material (including all the embarassing change marks that have caught more than a few people out ) You don't change the extension, BTW, you use File, then Save As and select RTF (Rich Text Format)

When I get a few minutes, I'll do some tests and if they pan out, I'll post somethin in TCS' thread.

[Feline]

Errm - RTFM - the .doc file went from 1.92Mb to 7.08Mb in the .rtf file - which is about the right magnitude of change I would like but in totally the wrong direction!

What's irritating about this is that I've had the problem before - and cracked it - but for the life of me I can't remember how!

I seem to remember there is a quite neat way of doing it ???

I do rather agree that MS Word really is a bit of a dog (I simply love the way that you make one change in a table and ooops! The whole damn table changes). But it's the one all the punters at the other end use ...

When I'm a little less submerged in the swamp with this particular problem I'll take another look at Open Office - is that what used to be Star Office?

And thanks Richard - but some of the folk I deal with don't quite have the mentality to even unzip files - Doh! - and all I'm trying to do is save a bit of upload/download time ...

[Memetic]

Open office is the free version of Star Office.

If you buy Star Office form Sun you get formal support.

Sticking to solutions that don't require a software change:

If this is just a table would it be any smaller in Excel?

Is it smaller as HTML?

[RomeoTangoFoxtrotMike]

Feline,

OK, so what happens when you read the RTF file in and save it back to .doc format ?

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

RomeoTangoFoxtrotMike,

Bad choice of words.

Should have said, saving with a different format/extension.

Richard

[seacue]

I was stumbling around in my Word 97 and found something that might help.

Open the document in question and select File|Versions .

One of the options I see is Delete . I didn't try it (don't have a "versioned" document), but I assume that you can select older versions and delete them.

Try at your own risk.

SC

[Feline]

Dunnit!

Well RTFM, that seems to do the trick!

Doc1.doc = 1.97Mb

Save in .RTF format

Doc2.rtf = 7.08Mb

Save again in .DOC format

Doc3.doc = 1.16Mb

Which is a satisfying 41% reduction in size. So thanks RTFM! When I've worked out the parameters, I'll e-mail you a coconut!

Also tried:

Edit|Select All => Edit|Copy => File|New|Blank Document => Edit|Paste

Which gives about the same reduction in size, but changes the font and seems to embolden some of the text on a random basis.

And Roundtripping it through HTM produces an intermediate .HTM file of 4.23Mb (+ 123Kb "files" folder) and opening the .HTM file in MS Word and re-saving it as a .DOC file produces a file of 2.84Mb.

Thanks for all your help folks - as usual the PPrune community comes through!

[FJJP]

If you're worried about file size and transferring between computers, a USB memory stick is probably the answer. I bought 2, each at 64Mb, and the computer treats it as a removable hard disk. The speed of transfer of data is as fast as the software can handle it and they are the size if a cigarette lighter...