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Old 08-29-2005, 05:26 AM   #1
JABTE05
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Default Mysterious File Size Increase

Hi, I've created a word document that contains my company's letterhead as images and distributed electronically to everyone in my company. I have receive one complaint from an employee that when she saves the document is it at about 300KB, but as soon as she types even one word and saves again, the document shoots up to about 3,000 KB. Does anyone know why that might happen? I've sent her several different versions (high res jpeg, low res jpeg, png...). Does it have anything to do with the fact that I created the document on a mac and she's using a pc? Everyone else in the company has a pc, and I haven't received any complaints. It sounds to me that it's more her computer than anything else that's causing the problem. Any ideas?
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Old 08-29-2005, 07:23 AM   #2
Andrew B.
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The first thing that comes to mind is Word is either re-rendering the image to a too-large format, or creating an undo/redo history. But the first test I would want to try is seeing how this is on another Windows computer. Not receiving complaints from others doesn't indicate much.
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Old 08-30-2005, 10:16 AM   #3
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew B.
The first thing that comes to mind is Word is either re-rendering the image to a too-large format, or creating an undo/redo history. But the first test I would want to try is seeing how this is on another Windows computer. Not receiving complaints from others doesn't indicate much.
I just checked on someone else's pc, and it's doing the same thing. What could this mean?
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Old 08-30-2005, 10:55 AM   #4
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I'm curious - what happens to the file size if she does a "Save As" on the document instead of "Save"?

   
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Old 08-30-2005, 11:03 AM   #5
JABTE05
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It does the same thing. It doesn't seem to matter if it's a "save as" or a "save."
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Old 08-30-2005, 12:52 PM   #6
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This may or may not help. Do a save as to rtf format of each version, and see if these have the similar size differences. If there, you might be able to look through the rtf documents with a text editor, and see what has been added. Perhaps a zillion fonts on that system? Maybe something in binary, a macro (don't know if those show up in rtf), or something else.

It might take you someplace.

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Old 08-30-2005, 05:55 PM   #7
Stephen Owades
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JABTE05
It does the same thing. It doesn't seem to matter if it's a "save as" or a "save."
Is it possible that the document is being saved as RTF, due to some issues of version compatibility? Images in RTF files become absolutely huge, and that could explain what has happened to your document. Have a look inside an actual big document and see what's in it--it could have a .DOC extension and still have RTF content.

When a recent version of Word is asked to save "backward" (i.e., to be readable by an earlier version of Word), it is likely to create an RTF file that appears to be a DOC file (with a .DOC extension). If your original document came from an earlier version of Word and your recipient is using a later version, you might well get a massive increase in the file size.
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Old 08-31-2005, 05:12 AM   #8
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When I save it as .doc it is 364 KB. As an .rtf it says 1.9 MB.

When I go to the save screen it says, "The default format for Word 2004. This format is shared by Word 97 through Word 2003 for Windows, and Word 98 through Word 2004 for Mac." I have Word 2004 for Mac, and she has Word 2003 for Windows, so they should be compatible when saving and opening, right?
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Old 08-31-2005, 07:13 AM   #9
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JABTE05
When I save it as .doc it is 364 KB. As an .rtf it says 1.9 MB.

When I go to the save screen it says, "The default format for Word 2004. This format is shared by Word 97 through Word 2003 for Windows, and Word 98 through Word 2004 for Mac." I have Word 2004 for Mac, and she has Word 2003 for Windows, so they should be compatible when saving and opening, right?
I think they should be compatible, but it seems likely that her save resulted in an RTF for some reason. Can you look at her saved document in a text editor (that won't interpret the RTF) or hex dump utility, to see if it's actually an RTF? If that's the case, there are probably some settings in Word 2003 that will result in a real ".doc" file of much smaller size.
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Old 08-31-2005, 07:22 AM   #10
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Stephen Owades
Can you look at her saved document in a text editor (that won't interpret the RTF) or hex dump utility, to see if it's actually an RTF?
When I do that, how will I be able to tell if it is an rtf? What should I be looking for?
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