Ask STC-Montreal: Humongous Word Documents
Ask STC-Montreal | Posted February 5th, 2009
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Today’s question to STC-Montreal is about slimming down Word documents.
Dear STC-Montreal,
I have a large Word document that is almost 40 MB, and contains a large number of graphics (mostly screen shots). Many of the graphics were added by people other than me, and I need to bring the file size down.
Is there a Word utility (or a procedure) that can tell me how “heavy” each graphic in the document is — so I can switch some of them to a smaller format (like .gif) and reduce the overall file size?
— PG
Join the discussion. Leave your ideas and suggestions for “PG” in the comments below.
February 5th, 2009 at 5:30 pm
Posted by Jim Royal.
Dear PG,
I don’t know of a utility that can analyze Word documents the way you describe.
The best approach would be to save your Word file as a web page. Word has this quirk that when you save your document for web, all the graphics files are exported in both their original format and scaled for web output. You can then check the collection of images for the oversize ones.
I’m assuming that most of the images in your doc are screen captures. In this case, you don’t want to resize them, or else you’ll loose details. But you can reduce their bit depth. Likely the screen caps are 24-bit. You can save them as 8-bit (PNG is a good format), and recoup some space that way.
Anther way to make Word documents that contain massive images more manageable (and less crash-prone) is to link the images to the Word file, rather than embedding them. This keeps the size of the Word file down, although you have to make sure that if you move the Word file, the image files move with it.
February 5th, 2009 at 8:23 pm
Posted by Andy Gural.
Another quickie option is to export to PDF and then use the optimize PDF option. You’ll have a lot of options for how images are compressed from within Acrobat Pro.
February 6th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
Posted by Ev Larsen.
A third option to try if you’re really up against some file size constraints is to run your images through a flatbed scanner to convert the files to a B&W format (if possible) or a scalable file type like jpeg that will allow you to play with size and resolution. You can then easily re-embed the slimmed-down images in their proper places and have a much smaller Word file as a final product.