template file size

[JanAdam]

Working on a custom template in Word 2003 pro I was making numerous changes
to styles including defining new styles and deleting others. I have noticed
that eventually saving my file got sluggish and the 4 pages template file
size grew to almost 60 Mb (yes, no error here). It looks as if it keeps a
cumulative track of all the changes made. What am I doing wrong?

 

[Robert M. Franz (RMF)]

Hi JA

Working on a custom template in Word 2003 pro I was making numerous changes
to styles including defining new styles and deleting others. I have noticed
that eventually saving my file got sluggish and the 4 pages template file
size grew to almost 60 Mb (yes, no error here). It looks as if it keeps a
cumulative track of all the changes made. What am I doing wrong?

even with all the changes, 60 MByte is huge.

Make sure that Tools | Options | Save: "Fast ..." is off.

One of the good parts about Word 2003 _pro_ is, you have now one of the
best save options available: save your file as *.xml, close, reopen,
save again as *.dot. This round-trip cleans out a lot of old stuff.

[I'm not sure it cleans out unused list templates, so if you have used
and changed a lot of numbered styles w/o naming the list templates, you
might end up with many of those in the file, and there aren't any ways
to scratch those out, even by VBA, as I am told.]

HTH
Robert