Excessive size Word doc!

[robilliards]

This is my first request for help so please be gentle!

I am using Word 2004 v11.2 on a 2005 pre-Intel G5 iMac (OSX v10.4.7). I
am an experienced Word user. We use Word primarily for building
participant worksbooks for our workshops. These contain tables, text,
images (pasted from Powerpoint as pictures - not linked), a watermark,
colour and shading (mainly in the tables).

We are building a new workshop and the participant's workbook has
suddenly blown out to a surprising 28MB in size. I have tried the old
tricks to reduce the size: 'save as' on top of the original, removing
some of the larger size images, removing the watermark but nothing
seems to make a substantial difference to the overall file size.

My issue with the size is that it is now impossible to email which I
would like to be able to do again. Our work-around has been to utilise
the .Mac server (public folder, password protected). These documents
are copyright. The review team are all on separate continents (Africa,
north America and Australia). Two use Mac and one uses a PC.

The document remains on my Mac and all changes are made by me. I can't
pinpoint the actual moment it bloated out.

Any suggestions would be most welcomed.

Thank you
Mark

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi Mark:

Chances are that when you converted from Mac to PC Word and edited in both,
you got the bloat at that stage.

When you paste PowerPoint as a "picture" it pastes as a vector graphic (EMF
on the PC, PICT on the Mac).

But when you convert from one platform to the other, it will convert to a
high-res high-colour-depth bitmap. Unfortunately, it does this on both
platforms, and keeps both versions in the document.

In this case, you may be better off embedding the pictures as PowerPoint
slides. Otherwise, create the document with linked pictures (not embedded)
in a folder of its own, which you can then Zip and send as a single unit.
Using external pictures, the graphics will hold their native format and will
not be embedded in the document.

To de-bloat that document, try creating a fresh blank document and pasting
in everything EXCEPT the final paragraph mark. If you have stranded RTF in
the graphics store of the document, that will leave it behind.

You also need to be careful sending full-page graphics from PC to Mac: they
do tend to inflate to 24 MB

Cheers

This is my first request for help so please be gentle!

I am using Word 2004 v11.2 on a 2005 pre-Intel G5 iMac (OSX v10.4.7). I
am an experienced Word user. We use Word primarily for building
participant worksbooks for our workshops. These contain tables, text,
images (pasted from Powerpoint as pictures - not linked), a watermark,
colour and shading (mainly in the tables).

We are building a new workshop and the participant's workbook has
suddenly blown out to a surprising 28MB in size. I have tried the old
tricks to reduce the size: 'save as' on top of the original, removing
some of the larger size images, removing the watermark but nothing
seems to make a substantial difference to the overall file size.

My issue with the size is that it is now impossible to email which I
would like to be able to do again. Our work-around has been to utilise
the .Mac server (public folder, password protected). These documents
are copyright. The review team are all on separate continents (Africa,
north America and Australia). Two use Mac and one uses a PC.

The document remains on my Mac and all changes are made by me. I can't
pinpoint the actual moment it bloated out.

Any suggestions would be most welcomed.

Thank you
Mark

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[dromanell]

You might want to refer to my post of June 16th which reflects a
similar inquiry. My only solution was to create the Word docs from
scratch on a PC. Even Microsoft tech support for Mac was perplexed.
Good luck!

 

[robilliards]

Thank you both for the time you have taken in replying. I have
committed many of the cardinal sins you have mentioned - particularly
pasting in images (as pictures) from PPoint and then resizing them in
the Word doc.

I have been in the habit of collecting all of the imagery for the
workbook in a single PPoint doc which would have typically photos
(imported from elsewhere) and models created in PP. My rationale was
that all the imagery inserts for the Word doc were then in the one
place and easy to keep track of. I pasted the stuff in from PP using
Copy Paste Special Picture because of previous problems with images
coming 'unglued' (bits missing, parts moved, different colours etc)
when linked and docs sent to from Mac to PC.

Anyway, you have given me some ideas on how to tidy up my doc so I
thank you very much.

PS I love GraphicConverter too. Clearly I'll need to learn a bit more
about the way graphics are handled in Word docs.

cheers
Mark

 

[Henri Arsenault]

Instead of storing your pictures on a Powerpoint document, just put
them in a separate folder and use Photoshop to get an overall view of
the picture set when you want to choose one.

You can also use photoshop to reduce the file size and to save the
pictures as JPEG files with various compressions as required.

BTW, there is a secret keystroke to select any part of a photo (or the
screen): press shift-contr-cmd-4 to get a cursor that you can use to
select any rectangle on the screen and put it on the clipboard. I use it
to select parts of photographs that I then paste into word documents. I
have never had any problems with the Word documents.

Henri