WORD file size grows (WORD 2000 (z9.0.3821 SR-1))

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First time poster, I hope this topic isn’t covered somewhere where I couldn’t find it.

I created a WORD document that contains links to an Excel spreadsheet. I open the Excel file first, put in a bunch of numbers, then Excel performs some calculations to come up with other numbers I need. I also use macros in Excel to create charts.

I then open up the WORD file and use links to grab the numbers I need from the Excel file. This set-up has saved a lot of time, since we use it to create several hundred WORD documents each year.

When I created these 2 files, they started out pretty small. As I added features, they grew to about 5 or 6 MB each. That wasn’t too bad. I’ve heard from my team members that they’ll often have problems with the WORD file growing very large >10MB. Yesterday, it happened to me. After several times opening and editing the same copy, the WORD file grew to 28MB!

What’s even starnger is that after my last edit, the WORD file shrunk to less than 700KB (yes, I mean “KB”, not “MB”)!

My question is: is there a way for me to get WORD to minimize its file size? I am familiar with ACCESS’s utility to “Compact and Repair database…”. Is there something similar for WORD?

Thanks!!!

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I’ve read that doing a Save As instead of Save reduces the file size. And making sure you have the Fast Saves in Tool|Options|Save unticked.

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Hi Chuckles,

As Wendy pointed out Fast Saves is probably turned on.

Fast Saves are known to be a primarily culprit in document corruption, but since it simply writes revisions to the file rather than a complete re-write, it is also a prime source of metadata.

To explain the sudden decrease in file size, Word will do a full save (complete rewrite instead of just appending changes) every 15th save or if there are so many edits that Word must do a full save.

So given this, I’d say that one of the above took place. Lucky for you that you noticed!
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Cheers!

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Wendy and BAM,
Thanks, this is the kind of thing that I expected it to be! However, it didn’t work…at least, not the first time I tried a “Save As…” with my template file. I checked and “Fast Saves” was turned off. I’ll play with it again and have my team look at it. Maybe it’ll work for someone here.

Thanks Again!

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