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What are the best ways to
using only tools available in the Office suite? (There's enough 15MB 3 page documents going around in the world)
svandragt
Posted 2009-07-17T08:41:28.123
Reputation: 2 933
18
Most of these will only help with existing documents, but saving as the Word 2007 DOCX format will help with new documents.
Word 2007
Compress Images
There are then various options for deleting cropped areas, lowering the resolution etc.
Save as DOCX
The new DOCX format is much smaller as it's basically a ZIP file wrapper. Try renaming a .docx file to .zip to look inside if you're curious.
Remove Hidden Data
See this article from Microsoft Remove hidden data and personal information from Office documents
Word 2003
Compress Images
Remove Hidden Data
Download the Office 2003/XP Add-in: Remove Hidden Data - "With this add-in you can permanently remove hidden data and collaboration data, such as change tracking and comments, from Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint files."
Tom Robinson
Posted 2009-07-17T08:41:28.123
Reputation: 2 350
How do you reduce the file size when there are too many images to do it manually? – user1603548 – 2014-11-03T21:25:30.843
@elliot100: You should really have given this as an answer so that I could upvote it. This alone worked wonders for me! – Tom – 2010-02-13T09:14:24.563
I was able to reduce a 13-MB doc to 1-MB by converting the internal images, from PNG to JPG format -- they were photos, which compress better in JPG. It takes saving the DOC as DOCX then unzipping the contents, converting the media files, and editting the xml to replace the image extensions. – Felipe G. Nievinski – 2018-05-25T23:06:51.593
You might want to avoid using the versioning features of Word too, they can add a lot of bulk to the document if there are lots of versions saved in the document. – Millhouse – 2009-10-07T15:00:35.527
1I'd also consider preparing images at a resolution suited to the document's destination. If it is for on-screen use only, there's no point in leaving the image at 1600 dpi in the file. If its only ever to be printed in black and white, then prepare monochrome images since your image editor will do a better job of the conversion that just leaving it to chance downstream. – RBerteig – 2009-07-17T20:22:44.943
If Remove Hidden Data isn't clever enough for you, there's a third-party tool called WorkShare that has much more customizability. Not sure I'd actually recommend it, as it tends to make Word crash a lot. – Richard Gadsden – 2009-10-16T12:10:33.350
3Additionally, ensure you're not embedding fonts in your document (Tools > Options > Save > untick "Embed Truetype fonts"). – e100 – 2009-11-04T17:51:34.890
2
If you don't want to or can't install the Remove Hidden Data Add-in suggested by tjrobinson you can just select the entire document and paste it into a new Word doc. Then save it and you'll have gotten rid of the hidden data.
Shane Kearney
Posted 2009-07-17T08:41:28.123
Reputation: 611
0
There are a few ways to do this:
Other then that there isn't really much more I can suggest. This really depends on the type of document you are creating.
BinaryMisfit
Posted 2009-07-17T08:41:28.123
Reputation: 19 955
Why do you want to optimize Word documents? You can just compress them after creation. It seems like there are much more significant space-saving techniques. – jtbandes – 2009-07-17T08:43:44.780