Reducing the size of a Microsoft Word document file

“Further to our discussions, I have a question: Is there any way of reducing the size of this file?”.

Yes, there is, or rather, there are.

Broad possibilities:

(1) The document is corrupted internally

(2) The document is poorly constructed

(3) The document carries an audit trail of changes

(4) The images are poorly formed

(5) The images could be stored externally

(6) Too many unused styles in the document

(7) The file could be produced as a PDF file

We will examine each of these possibilities in turn with a real document.

The Initial Document

This document was delivered to us by email.

The size is reported as 8,321,476 bytes.

From this point on we will report sizes in megabytes or kilobytes.

The size of the original document is reported as 8,224 KB.

The document is a quotation prepared for my client’s client; as such it contains tabular data, text and images. Since it is a prepared quotation, printing it to PDF before sending it to the client’s client is always an option.

Before we begin work we should establish several points;

Point 1: What is the ultimate purpose of the document? (What is your goal?)

Point 2: Why is the current size unacceptable?

Point 3: Can the original graphics files of all images be obtained?

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