File is smaller after crash recovery

[Ray Mitchell]

Hello,

I'm using Word from Office 2007 on a WinXP system with 2GB RAM. My file is
a .doc and is about 6.5MB. About every 10th save or so it hangs up in the
middle of the save and I have to kill it, but has always managed to recover
everything fine. Although it's annoying, I just figure that's the way it
works so I live with it. Anyway, that's not my question.

The last time this happened I noticed that the recovered file was only about
4.5MB, about 2MB smaller then it had been in the past. However, upon
inspecting its contents everything seemed to be okay including all of the
embedded drawings and the most recent changes I made. So, how can this be?
I've got a feeling that there may be a lot of data in the files that actually
is not used for anything but is just kept because it is the easiest thing to
do. But, as a result of this particular recovery it somehow got optimized
out, or compacted as it were. Does this sound correct? If so, is there a
way to manually compact such documents?

Thanks,
Ray

 

[Stefan Blom]

Copying the whole document, except for the final paragraph mark (¶), into a
new file might be sufficient to clear "garbage" from the document.