Compressing Word Documents

I have a Word '08 document that is over 19 Mb. It needs to be compressed to less than 5 Mb to meet certain qualifications. Does anyone know how to do this?

My computer is a mid-2008 iMac with 10.6.8.

Thanks for any responses.

Please respond to <pilot 80 at shaw.ca>. Remove the spaces and change "at" to "@."

Old Mac User

When you post a question here, it's answered here not by email. If you wish to subscribe to this thread you can do that as an option. When someone answers you'll be notified by email. And.. please do not post your email address in a forum message or thread. That will only result in Spam.

To answer your question: It's unlikely that you can compress a 19 MB Word file to less than 5 MB. It might be possible if it's made up of all text. In other words no graphics, bullets, page numbers, tables, etc. There are numerous free compression programs for the Mac that you can try. iZip for Mac is one of the best and it's entirely free.

Does it have to be a Word document or can it be a PDF? You can try saving it as a PDF to see how the size changes and if it isn't within your size limit, you can try using Preview to optimize the size..

Alternatively, if you're just sending this large document to someone who can only receive 5MB files or something, you can always have any compression program create a spanning compressed image that takes your 19MB Word file and breaks it into how many ever 5MB compressed files it needs..