Yikes! Huge MS Word text files all of a sudden.

[Susan B. D.]

Recently my Word text files have become way bigger than they should be.
What used to be 32 kb or 100 kb files have mushroomed into 1.5 MB plus
files. Some of these files have no more than a few lines of text in them. They
seem to grow after they have been opened, worked on, saved and closed a
couple of times. I have tried the "save as" routine to clean them up, but they
are still huge. Only when I select all, copy and paste the text into a brand
new document does the size return to normal. And then the cycle begins all
over again with the new document. Emailing attachments has become
problematic; my files are so big I can only attach even short and simple docs
one at a time.

I am on a G4 Cube running OS Panther 10.3.3 and MS Office X for Mac with
Word 10.1.4.

Any suggestions?

Susan B. D.

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Hi Susan,

The most common cause of file bloat is "Allow Fast Saves." Go to View>
Saves, turn off "Allow Fast Saves" and leave it off! Now do another select
all, copy (everything *except* the last paragraph mark) and paste into a new
document. Save it. You should be okay now.

You can also turn on "Always make Backup". It will make a backup of your
document as it existed when you first opened it for the current work
session. Beyond that, get used to saving (Command>s) often.

--
Beth Rosengard
Mac MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/WordMac/index.htm>
Entourage Help Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/toc.html>

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word]]

Susan:

Beth's answer is likely to be the answer. However, you should also look up
Track Changes in the Help and make sure that you have not inadvertently left
that turned on. If you have, nothing ever gets deleted from the document,
in case you ever want to get it back.

Sometimes this condition is caused by a corrupt Normal Template, but in that
case, the new blank document is also huge.

Cheers

Hi Susan,

The most common cause of file bloat is "Allow Fast Saves." Go to View>
Saves, turn off "Allow Fast Saves" and leave it off! Now do another select
all, copy (everything *except* the last paragraph mark) and paste into a new
document. Save it. You should be okay now.

You can also turn on "Always make Backup". It will make a backup of your
document as it existed when you first opened it for the current work
session. Beyond that, get used to saving (Command>s) often.

--

Please respond only to the newsgroup to preserve the thread.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. GMT + 10 Hrs
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]