Word 2008 docx confusion!

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

A 1000 page document is going to be fairly large regardless of the file format it was saved in. I'm not a lover of the new file format (XML) but one thing it does do however, is keep file sizes small. Unfortunately, unless someone has the Word XML file viewer\converter, or is using Office 2007\Office 2008, they have no way to open the file. (I believe Open Office can likewise open them.)

When you convert from XML to RTF it makes the file much larger (in your case 10X) because of the added information and attributes. Saving it back to DOC from RTF does lessen the size.

If you have the original file (in XML format) try doing a "save as" and use the MS Word 97 - 2003 file format, compatibility mode, and see if the size is decreased further from the now 24 MB.

Regards.

if you dont, open it with pages, then export as pdf

As a suggestion go into Word preferences and choose to save as .doc rather than .docx, which is the default.

podraig said:

if you dont, open it with pages, then export as pdf

Click to expand...

No need to do that. Just go to File > Print and export as PDF from there (PDF > Save as PDF...). You can do this with any Mac application that prints.