Major file bloating in Word97, is it fixed in Word 2003

[SlickRCBD]

I needed to do a document and also prepare a PowerPoint for use on a
laptop. unfortunately, due to Murphy's Law, the only laptop I have in
working order at the moment is an ancient Windows 98 system with
Office 97 that I haven't used in years. I thought it might be easier
to prepare the stuff in Office97 rather than worry about accidentally
using something that would make my document incompatible.

While putting a few tables and charts from Excel into a Word document,
my file size swelled. Worse, when I was revising and deleting a few
charts, then making a few new ones it didn't seem to affect the file
size except to increase it. It never decreased even when I saved
intern things with far less data.

When I was all done, the file was over 1mb. Hitting CTRL-A, CTRL-C,
then opening a new Word document and then hitting CTRL-V caused the
new document to be only 400-some K.
Given that I have to move it to the old laptop via floppy, I'm a
little sensitive to file size. Was this wasteful behavior fixed in
Word 2003? I don't recall ever seeing things quite this bad, but it's
been a while since I've had to worry about file sizes this much. Given
that the thumb flash drive I normally use is as large as the ancient
laptop's hard drive, it's not normally an issue. Heck, I've got a tumb
drive that is larger than the laptop hard drive.


I normally work in Word 2003 as my latest computer only came with the
Office 2007 trial. Since I don't like the new interface anyways, I
was unwilling to shell out $ to pay to convert to the full version.

 

[Graham Mayor]

Copy all but the final paragraph mark into a new blank document and save
that.
Don't even think of *saving* to floppy. COPY it after saving it to the hard
drive.
Be aware that Word documents can be much larger than the capacity of a
floppy drive, so you may need to use a zip utility such as WinRar to split
it into a number of parts ... or you could e-mail it to yourself ... or
create an ad hoc network using an Ethernet crossover cable to transfer it.

--
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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[SlickRCBD]

Be aware that Word documents can be much larger than the capacity of a
floppy drive, so you may need to use a zip utility such as WinRar to split
it into a number of parts ... or you could e-mail it to yourself ... or
create an ad hoc network using an Ethernet crossover cable to transfer it.

I don't know why my earlier reply never showed up.


I'd love to do the last option, but can you recommend a place where i
can get a cheap Ethernet NIC for a Windows 98 _First_ Edition laptop
that has a single type 3 PCMICA slot and USB ports but no built-in
Ethernet? It does have a built-in 56K modem.

The problem is Windows 98 First Edition drivers, and I really don't
want to spend a lot of money on a laptop that's been sitting unused in
my closet for over four years.

 

[Jay Freedman]

I don't know why my earlier reply never showed up.


I'd love to do the last option, but can you recommend a place where i
can get a cheap Ethernet NIC for a Windows 98 _First_ Edition laptop
that has a single type 3 PCMICA slot and USB ports but no built-in
Ethernet? It does have a built-in 56K modem.

The problem is Windows 98 First Edition drivers, and I really don't
want to spend a lot of money on a laptop that's been sitting unused in
my closet for over four years.

Finding a card for that could be tough. But since you have USB ports
(presumably USB 1.0, but that's ok), you could try a USB memory stick. You
might be limited by Win98 to a 256 MB or 512 MB stick, but that should be
enough. Copy documents to the stick, move the stick to the other computer,
and copy to the hard drive.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
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