Maximum document size

[RGBrasel]

I am using MS Word 2003 as a source file editor for a Help Authoring Tool for
a large software documentation project, and one of my main files, which
contains a huge amount of jpegs, is approaching 18 MB. What's the largest
file size I can safely maintain without horrible things happening to my
project?

Thanks!

 

[JoAnn Paules]

Horrible things can happen with a 18KB file.

I was working with a file that kept blowing up to 60+MB. My system was *not*
happy but it was a hardware issue in that case. I also found a way to reduce
the file size to a manageable 6 MB.

--

JoAnn Paules
MVP Microsoft [Publisher]

~~~~~
How to ask a question
http://support.microsoft.com/KB/555375

 

[Jay Freedman]

I am using MS Word 2003 as a source file editor for a Help Authoring Tool for
a large software documentation project, and one of my main files, which
contains a huge amount of jpegs, is approaching 18 MB. What's the largest
file size I can safely maintain without horrible things happening to my
project?

Thanks!

The documented limit for a document is 32 MB of text, which does not
include the size of any embedded objects. As a practical limit,
though, Word tends to get slower as documents get larger. You may want
to look into linking the pictures with INCLUDEPICTURE fields instead
of embedding them in the document.

Document corruption can happen at almost any document size, as JoAnn
implied. The article
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/CorruptDoc.htm discusses some
causes and remedies. Despite the dire warnings there, though, for most
people corruption is rare to nonexistent. Just be careful to keep good
and frequent backups.