HELP!!! MS Word expert up this time of night?

I am slaving thru a MS WORD document...this is my final paper for my last class, and something is going horribly wrong.

My paper is tripling in size although I am not doing a lot of formatting. I removed all of my illustrations (6 JPEG files averaging about 150KB each, and file size only shrank from 5MB to 3MB. It's about a 30 page text.

Tonight, with my last edit, with very little formatting an I haven't added the illustrations again, its size tripledto 16MB. If this thing gets any bigger, I can't even mail it to my prof...can someone send me a clue?

Did you save it in Word format or something else? The format can make a big difference.

currently working in Word 2K. I have XP but afraid to install it until I finish this thing...it's about 80% done and due last next week. I plan to send it out this weekend....

Maybe you can try saving it in HTML format. Its what I have to do on my computer.

But man, I have 50 and 60 page files that are just over a megabyte. Something is WRONG.


It isn't due tomorrow, is it?

It's mostly complete. I need to add about 5 more paragraphs...

Resave in a different format.

Save the doc, close and reopen word and try resaving.

Restart the system.

Copy and paste the text into Notepad, save it there as a .txt doc, and try opening that doc in Word.

Hope this helps. Good luck.

1) "Save as" an .rtf (Rich Text Format) file. If you have any fancy formatting, it might disappear, but if it's just a straight paper, it should be fine.

2) If that doesn't work, open you Notepad program. Cut and paste entire paper into notepad. Close down Word. Let it rest for a minute. Re-open Word and cut and paste you paper from Notepad into word. Notepad takes away most formatting, and hopefully starting fresh with a new word document will make the miraculously-expanding file go buh-bye.

1) RTF saved and it's now 321KB. Ihad only a title, 1st heading and captions (for both tables and figures), along with headers and footers.

2) I am going to save in Notepad too as a backup and reformat the document. Fortunately I am so far along in the paper I will be able reformat and still turn the paper in early.

Thank you!

you accidentally cut and pasted something extra in there to me.

If you want to, you can use my email link and I will take a look at it.

:shrug:

I don't want to change horses in the middle of my apocalypse!

Even if you don't currently have it on, it may have been logging them at some point. Check by selecting the "view final including changes" (or something like that; I'm on a Mac right now, and assuming you're on PC; can't remember the exact wording there), and then "accept all changes" and make sure you've turned off the track changes feature before you save the final. (On Mac, this feature is in the Tools menu.)

Also, you can try saving it as an RTF; this could also make it bigger, but if there's some mystery code in there, it may dump it and then may save as a smaller file if you then open the RTF and save as a Word doc again.

And finally, you can Zip the file to compress it for mailing; if you're using Windows, this option should be in your Accessories, I think.

Good luck!

(on edit: track changes means everything you think you've deleted is still there)

I had this problem with Word file tracking and I turned tracking off on this one too.

oh-oh...Word crashed with this rtf file.

Now it's on to Wordpad!!!

There is no way that 30 pages of plain text can amount to 16 MB. I have papers longer than that with illustrations, tables, and other embedded objects that are way less than 1 MB.

If you can't find the formatting weirdness that's causing this try this instead.

1. Save your file, as is. Just in case.

2. Save as a plain ascii text file (Plain Text) with a different name, of course-- don't over-write your backup!. See how big that file is--I'm betting not much more that 10 KB or so.

3. Open the plain text file in a new, blank document. Save in word *.doc format without doing ANY reformating-- again with a different name. Check the size of that file. I'm betting it's still pretty small, way under 1 MB.

4. Now for the pain in the ass part-- if the new word file is small, fix it's formatting by hand, changing fonts, etc to match your original file. Save it and check the size.

This is a pain, but unless you can find whatever's in that file that's causing it to be huge, doing this might be easier than fooking with it all night. 'Luck!

I decided to do one more thing...

Originally I had this document written in Times New Roman 12 pt font, and at some point to distinguish it from a companion document, changed font to Arial 12pt.

I changed the font back to Times New Roman, and saved back as Word document, and now I am at a saner 204KB. Guess I'll burn a few minutes more of midnight oil and turn in...

THANKS EVERYONE. DU'ers are the best!

Your prof's computer will take CDs...won't it?

I am a distance student..my prof is in another state. That is why I am going to finish this early, if this sucker blows again, he will get a CD!!!!

now to purge all these 16MB files....yikes...

of the doc. Cut every thing out of the doc except the last character (prolly a period) and paste it in a new doc.

Voila!