How in the Tech

Shrink Those Word Documents

By Adam Myers ⋅ June 6, 2008 ⋅ Tags: Microsoft Word

Those of you that do a lot of editing on large Word documents loaded graphics, charts, or other objects have probably noticed that the document file size can quickly become unwieldy. The proper method when adding pictures is to actually do so via the Insert mechanism rather than the typical Copy/Paste. While the end result is visually identical, Microsoft treats them differently behind the scenes. The copy/paste method generally results in the embedding of the uncompressed image which, when saved, can result in a document size in the 10′s of megabytes – quite large to be emailing around. There is a simple fix to this however that doesn’t require us to switch our editing/writing habits.

1. Save a backup copy of the document just in case.
2. With the desired Word document open type Ctrl+A to select all the content.
3. Now type Ctrl+Shift+F9.
4. Save the new document and compare the size with the original. On a 50 page document loaded with charts and photos the size shrunk from 35MB to just under 1MB.