Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

General discussion

Unable to email MS Word file

Apr 7, 2011 9:33AM PDT

My dad sent me a 15 page MS Word file with a few graphs. It was and still is 4.14 megabytes. I renamed it, added some comments - approx. 28 words - and all of a sudden the file size is 27.8 megabytes - because of this I can't send it over the aol network. I deleted all the graphs - and it's still 27.8 Mb. I don't understand how this can happen.

Discussion is locked

- Collapse -
Tried to zip it
Apr 7, 2011 9:40AM PDT

Someone suggested I zip this thing. I've never zipped a file. Tried Winzip a few years ago, and the instructions for zipping a file were so vague, I gave up. Microsoft has links to PKzip, Stuffit, etc. Does it really matter which one I use? I do have rar archiver on this machine; I can right click on the file and it appears to be compressing it and then it says, "Unable to email ...zip" - and I can't find the zipped file anywhere on the pc.

- Collapse -
Re: Word file
Apr 7, 2011 5:24PM PDT

It's strange indeed that the file became so much bigger. What happens if you just open that file and save it (under another name, don't do anything with the original) without any changes?

You don't tell much.
- What filetype is the original (doc or docx or rtf)?
- What version of Word do you use (2002, 2003, 2007, 2010)?
- What's the filetype of the file you saved (doc or docx or rtf)?

Assuming you use Windows XP or higher (it doesn't work in 95, 98 or ME) nothing is easier than zipping, if you don't know how to do it in rar archiver.
Just right click on the file in Explorer, choose Send to... and choose 'compressed folder'. That's XP-speak for "zip-file". Because nobody understood that, Microsoft added "zipped" to the description in Windows 7.
You'll find the zip-file with the same name (but a .zip extension, of course) in the same folder as the file(s) you zipped.

For all details, read
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306531
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/vz_ovrvw.mspx?mfr=true
It's the same in Vista and 7.


Kees

- Collapse -
Almost
Apr 8, 2011 6:01AM PDT

Hey Kees, thanks!

It worked! But it only reduced the size by two Mb. Still too large to email. And this is the document without graphs - reduced from 15 pages to 10 pages of text. I don't know how this coulda happened. I usually use yousendit or transferbigfiles for things like this, but my dad hasn't caught on to it yet.
I think he created it in Word 2010 as a doc and I saved it as a doc in Word 97 (yes, 1997).

- Collapse -
Time to progress to 2011.
Apr 8, 2011 6:13AM PDT

Download OpenOffice 3.3 (it's free) and see if you find Writer doing a better job on the original document than Word 97.
Link: http://download.openoffice.org/

Maybe even consider to say goodbye to Word if you like Writer.

Kees

- Collapse -
And the tricks to make such a file smaller.
Apr 8, 2011 6:22AM PDT

a. Copy/paste to Wordpad. Copy/paste to a new Word document. Might work, but you'll lose some layout.
b. Copy/paste to Notepad. Copy/paste to a new Word document. Surely works, but you'll lose all layout. However, the 10 page text document is 30 to 50 kB at most (and most of it is overhead).

It's not ideal, but it's better than sending nothing.

Kees