Size of my unchanged doc jumped from 4 MB to 40 MB. What happened?

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Guest

Yesterday my document was about 4MB, as it has been for months. Today it is *ten times* that size, 40 MB, although I have not added anything. I made some changes but there isn't any more text or graphics than there was before.

I'm not using anything that I haven't used a million times over the years: features, formatting, layout, fonts, images, tables, anything. So if I did something that increases the file size by a factor of 10, you would think it would have had this effect some time in the past (right?)

Just to answer a possible question: I'm not confusing kilobytes with megabytes. Yesterday it was 4,000 KB; today it is 40,000 KB.

Richard
 
G'day "finisterre" <[email protected]>,

The images have probably stored multiple copies of themselves in the
document. An extract from my Word Spellbook:

n Word does not understand any graphic except.wmf, .emf (wmf's
bigger cousin) and .bmp;
n Word imports SOME OTHER graphic formats. When it does so, it must
have TWO copies of the graphic. One as the original .whatever file.
One as an internal-use only bitmap that word can use to display a
representation of the inserted graphic. See Q224663 on the MS
Knowledge Base. The safest ones to use are PNG , GIF, and JPG. PNG and
GIF are good for low color shots like screen captures, JPG is better
for full natural color pictures;
n When you crop or otherwise adjust a picture using word's built-in
controls, it needs at least two copies (both of which CAN be satisfied
by point 2 above) - an original and a display copy;
n BMP is the most inefficient way of storing a picture;
n Linked pictures should not be stored with the document, but this
rule is subordinate to cropping;


Steve Hudson - Word Heretic
Want a hyperlinked index? S/W R&D? See WordHeretic.com

steve from wordheretic.com (Email replies require payment)


finisterre reckoned:
 
Hi Richard,

Here are the leading causes of file bloat:

1) Fast Saves (Tools/Options/Save)
2) Preview Picture (File/Properties)
3) Versions (File/Versions) Make sure "Automatically save version on close" is not turned on
4) Revisions (Tools/Track Changes)
Highlight Changes: Make sure "Highlight changes on screen is turned on"
Accept/Reject Changes: If "Accept All" or "Reject All" is available then revisions are present.
5) Embedded True Type fonts (Tools/Options/Save)

If all of the above check out then it could be on the verge of corruption. Try creating a new document and use Insert/File and insert the contents of your document and see if that resolves the issue.

--
Please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup. Email requests for assistance can not be acknowledged.

~~~~~~~
Beth Melton

Word FAQ: http://mvps.org/word
TechTrax: http://mousetrax.com/techtrax/
 
Hi finisterre

File ballooning can be one of the symptoms of incipient document corruption,
so you might want to try saving out to HTML and back, or cutting and pasting
all but the last para mark into a new file.

Otherwise I would also be suspecting graphics problems for anything as large
as this - I had a 45 MB file sent to me where the cause of the problem was
jpeg graphics inserted as embedded Microsoft Photo Editor objects - and this
apparently without the editor knowing how they had done it or at what point
the file had become so large. I've also heard of sudden jumps in file sizes
when someone made a small size change to a graphic (format unknown), which
fits with Word Heretic's explanations.

--
Margaret Aldis - Microsoft Word MVP
Syntagma partnership site: http://www.syntagma.co.uk


finisterre said:
Nope, can't be that, because I didn't do anything that I haven't done
Click to expand...
thousands of times over the years -- and this file-size explosion has never
happened before.
What I mean is, I didn't intentionallly use any Word function that I
Click to expand...
haven't used many times before. I can't promise that I didn't happen to hit
some strange combination of keys by accident, or accidentally checked some
box in some menu somewhere without noticing, with no visible change to the
document apart from the jump in filesize. But if this is the case, then
there should be a way to find out what happened and to undo it, because
there can't be that many possible things you can do to a document that (A)
don't make it look any different and (B) make it ten times bigger. Or can
there?
 
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