marco772 Posted March 7, 2009 Share Posted March 7, 2009 Hi, I was putting the finishing touches to a 1000 page document yesterday using Word 2008. When it saved it saved in the new docx format. It's size was a reasonable 4.2MB When I tried to open it today, Word kept freezing up and I had to force quit. Eventually I got it open using a convertor program that changed it to a .rtf. THIS made the file a whopping 42MB! I "Saved As" and saved it to the more widely compatible .doc format as I want to send it to someone, but now it's a still massive 24MB! Does that seem rather excessive? Even for 1000 pages? Can anyone clear up my confusion on this? Thanks Mark Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hp hackintosh Posted March 8, 2009 Share Posted March 8, 2009 Mark, In response to your question, I will give some of my own examples. To create large documents, I used a copy-paste function of one of my own essays to produce around a thousand pages inside of Apple's iWork Pages '09. I used the same document and converted to the different formats so it was the same document I used each time. *.pages: 2.2 mb *.doc: 4.0 mb (through iWork) *.doc: 3.9 mb (through OpenOffice.org) *.odt: 40 kb (through OpenOffice.org's native format) *.rtf: 2.6 mb (through OpenOffice.org) Interesting that odt format compressed the text best. Maybe it recognized the copy-paste factor (even though the copy and pasting was done in Pages, not OpenOffice). While I do not have Word '08 for Mac to check the results, I know that Microsoft uses the same docx format as they do for Windows and this format is better at compression than previous versions of Microsoft Office. Now, what sort of info is in your 1,000 pages? If it was more than text (mine was just text and some formatting, very little), then perhaps that would explain a larger file size. But look at the docx format, it seems pretty reasonable at compressing it either way. The large increases in the file size could be a glitch or unnecessary code (possibly recursive) being added into your document. It is the "hidden" code that you don't see... like "junk" code or "junk" DNA. By the way you are describing it, it sure sounds like the file got corrupted while saving or something. A corrupted file could make a huge word document or a huge rtf file in a conversion since maybe there was no "end" to the file, so it keeps converting... if that makes sense. Is the file able to open and can you see all your text now? The fact that the docx format was freezing Word is not good. Most people should be able to open docx formats (old office programs can download a converter, OpenOffice supports it, I believe iWork '09 does too), so you could keep it in that format. If you can see all the text, try and select all your work in the file and create a new document and try re-saving it, in docx and doc formats and then see if the file size decreases (so only copy and paste the text or images or whatever you have). I hope that information helps... seeing file sizes that big is definitely not a good sign, especially if it is mostly text! Hi, I was putting the finishing touches to a 1000 page document yesterday using Word 2008. When it saved it saved in the new docx format. It's size was a reasonable 4.2MB When I tried to open it today, Word kept freezing up and I had to force quit. Eventually I got it open using a convertor program that changed it to a .rtf. THIS made the file a whopping 42MB! I "Saved As" and saved it to the more widely compatible .doc format as I want to send it to someone, but now it's a still massive 24MB! Does that seem rather excessive? Even for 1000 pages? Can anyone clear up my confusion on this? Thanks Mark Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
marco772 Posted March 8, 2009 Author Share Posted March 8, 2009 HI, Thanks for the detailed reply! The document is a collection of Facebook mails. I began it using Windows and Word 2004. That used to also copy the profile pictures which accompany each post, so there ARE some small pictures too. However, the majority of it has been done on Word 08 on the mac. The mac chose to ignore the photos so the majority of the document IS text simply copy and pasted in, with no extra formatting! 28MB still seems big to me, however, I remembered that I could zip it for mailing which reduces it to 3.0 MB! I have reset Word 08's preferences to save everything from now on in the old .doc format! I'm SURE it SHOULD open it in .docx though! It's would seem ridiculous to offer it as the default save option if it can't! Maybe it has become corrupted in some way... I did some Googling though and found a lot of people were/are having trouble with .docx files. Here's an example that I found interesting; http://starmastersguide.blogspot.com/2008/...torment-me.html Hmmm, it's all most strange and not a little frustrating! Thanks again Mark Mark, In response to your question, I will give some of my own examples. To create large documents, I used a copy-paste function of one of my own essays to produce around a thousand pages inside of Apple's iWork Pages '09. I used the same document and converted to the different formats so it was the same document I used each time. *.pages: 2.2 mb *.doc: 4.0 mb (through iWork) *.doc: 3.9 mb (through OpenOffice.org) *.odt: 40 kb (through OpenOffice.org's native format) *.rtf: 2.6 mb (through OpenOffice.org) Interesting that odt format compressed the text best. Maybe it recognized the copy-paste factor (even though the copy and pasting was done in Pages, not OpenOffice). While I do not have Word '08 for Mac to check the results, I know that Microsoft uses the same docx format as they do for Windows and this format is better at compression than previous versions of Microsoft Office. Now, what sort of info is in your 1,000 pages? If it was more than text (mine was just text and some formatting, very little), then perhaps that would explain a larger file size. But look at the docx format, it seems pretty reasonable at compressing it either way. The large increases in the file size could be a glitch or unnecessary code (possibly recursive) being added into your document. It is the "hidden" code that you don't see... like "junk" code or "junk" DNA. By the way you are describing it, it sure sounds like the file got corrupted while saving or something. A corrupted file could make a huge word document or a huge rtf file in a conversion since maybe there was no "end" to the file, so it keeps converting... if that makes sense. Is the file able to open and can you see all your text now? The fact that the docx format was freezing Word is not good. Most people should be able to open docx formats (old office programs can download a converter, OpenOffice supports it, I believe iWork '09 does too), so you could keep it in that format. If you can see all the text, try and select all your work in the file and create a new document and try re-saving it, in docx and doc formats and then see if the file size decreases (so only copy and paste the text or images or whatever you have). I hope that information helps... seeing file sizes that big is definitely not a good sign, especially if it is mostly text! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Synaesthesia Posted March 8, 2009 Share Posted March 8, 2009 .docx uses simple zip compression - it should make documents smaller than uncompressed .rtf. This is why its' so big. I'm sure if you zip the .rtf it will be much smaller. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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