Word Word Doc v Open Office odt & versions

[SlimJim]

I have recently had a few problems with Word so finally decided to try OpenOffice. Can any one explain the following phenomenon.

I have a 45 page Word document which takes up 10,289 KB on my hard disk. I load it into OpenOffice and immediately save it in Open Office Text (odt) format the file size on my hard disk is 69 KB. As far as I can tell there are no changes in the document itself so the bloat associated with the doc file must be something else. I check versions and I have one previously saved versions so I delete it and save again, The doc file now comes in at 305 KB.

Is this normal - the massive bloat associated with a saved version?
Why is odt format so efficient compared to doc format and does it happen with all documents or is this just a special case?

 

[Ian]

I think Open Office saves things in some form of XML file (the new Office 2007 office does too now). It can make things much much smaller, but I've not seen a difference that big before - normally my documents have halved in size.

It might be worth opening up that document on another PC just to check it doesn't link to any external files, such as images. If it literally is just pure text, then it is most likely just left over bloat from MS Word.

 

[SlimJim]

Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately I don't have another PC available at the moment - the next time my grandson turns up with his laptop I'll give it a try. However, there are no images in the document, so I think leftover bloat is probably the answer.

 

[Ian]

10MB is too big for a document without images (unless you have written a gigantic 800 page novel!), so I think that bloat is the answer