Why are Word 2007 files so large?

[willarmstrong]

Starting in November 2009, my .doc AND .docx files started becoming bloated
at the factor of 500-1000%!!! A file that was 250KB in August is now over
2.5MB!

I have read dozens of postes here on this topic and tried everything
recommended by the MVP's, but to no avail. I started from scratch and
recreated the documents in SafeMode (winword /a) and saved in both formats,
but they were still vastly oversized. I have deselected embedding fonts,
revision tracking, thumbnail views, etc... but still to no avail. I have been
using Office 2007 since July, so could it be an automatic update that caused
this problem. I have made no other changes or installed any other software. I
am using the exact same configuration as I did in July and August. Please
help me solve as I am unable to upload resumes to many services that limit
file size to less than 500KB but must be in Word (.doc) format. Thank you!

 

[Yves Dhondt]

Have you tried turning on the paragraph markers and then copying everything
except the last paragraph marker into a new document to see if that makes
them smaller.

If you have a Word 2007 docx document, you can rename its extension from
docx to zip and checks its contents. If you could locate the largest files
in the zip package, that might also tell something about what is causing the
files to be so big.

Yves