Re: MS Word Bloat

Subject: Re: MS Word Bloat
From: "Guru Kamath" <guru -at- bom5 -dot- vsnl -dot- net -dot- in>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2000 20:11:18 +0530

Hello all,
Greetings from India!

The Microsoft Knowledge base had at least 8 articles on this problem or
related problems. The file size bloating, mainly in Word 2000, could be due
to various reasons.

a) The Allow Fast Save feature needs to be disabled.
Fast save appends new material added (and apprently what is deleted) as you
go on writing and saving. In other words, these are incremental saves of all
the edits that you have carried out on the document. If Allow Fast Saves is
ON and you pass on a file which has just been saved -- you pass on a whole
lot of mess. However, if you do a Save As the program will rebuild the file
as one neat whole. This will reduce the file size (by removing the unwanted
junk, if any)

b) Save As is the magic word.
Save As is the solution to all Word Bloat problems. Word recreates the file
and saves it again -- this gets rid of several "problems" which the file
might have had. Incidentally, if you Save a document 14 times -- the 15th
time Word 2000 will automatically do a COMPLETE save (even if you have Fast
Save on!)! As good as a Save As and should solve your problem! (Important --
do not have Allow Fast Saves on!)

c) Moving a document from an earlier version to Word 2000. Solution: Save
as!
Word 2000 uses compression and therefore leaves enough space when it
encounters an earlier version. This causes the Word 2000 file to bloat. To
solve this problem simply add a few words or even a few spaces and do a Save
As your file should be in the correct size now. In other words -- Word
finally recognizes that it is a Word 2000 file! Please do remember to save
documents in Word document format (not in other formats). You will
appreciate that if the doc is being saved in other formats (say Word 97 or
RTF, etc) the file size could be larger as Word has to save two versions --
the Word 2000 version and the other version that you want.

d) Graphics -- Word 2000 saves several versions of a graphic.
When you insert a graphic in Word 2000 -- it saves several versions of the
graphic. The solution to this apparently is to put a space after the
graphic and save the file again (yes the magic Save As will do!) and presto
it saves only one version of the graphic.

e) Do your maths and do a simple test!
When you open a file and save it with a few words, the file size should be
the size of your normal.dot plus a few KB more -- say 19KB (to 32-75 KB
depending on your normal.dot size). If you save and it becomes 104 Kb and
then 700 KB and then 1.2 MB -- you have a problem somewhere. If you add a
graphic of say 100 KB -- the new file size should be 19KB plus 100 KB (plus
a few more KBs), say between 119 KB to 125 KB. However, if it is 200 or 400
KB -- you know Word has saved some unwanted information. You can then try to
solve this problem.

f) Other reasons and causes. (Not truly a bloat!)
If you have hidden text, track changes, linking and other information, an
abnormally large normal.dot, and several such things your file size will
definitely be more than the sum of its known parts. However, I would not
regard this as a bloat -- as your maths will indicate that the sum of the
parts add up to the whole (and a bit more for packaging and the unknown
parts!)

Hope this helps.

Guru (guru -at- bom5 -dot- vsnl -dot- net -dot- in)
(a teleommuting technical writer from India!)





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