We live in a time when for many Internet It forms an important part of their lives, both professionally and personally. But the connections that we have on most occasions, despite being much better than years ago, are not infinite. This means that they have certain bandwidths available, and in some cases there are even limits on the amount of data uploaded and downloaded. It is for all these reasons that we still have to be careful about the contents with which we work here.
Many may think that there is no greater problem when sending a document Word by mail or place it on a web page. However, we must bear in mind that sometimes we find ourselves with huge documents and also full of additional content. Here elements such as photos, videos, tables, graphs, etc. come into play. That is why it is recommended that we try to reduce the weight of this as much as possible, something in which we are going to help you.
All this not to mention the situation in which we want to make a backup copy of all these text documents that we have created with the program Microsoft. And it is that in the event that your weight is greater than usual, in certain circumstances it can become a serious problem. In the event that we are talking about a moderate number of files with these characteristics, there will be no problem when storing them, for example, on an external hard drive.
However, sometimes, and especially in more professional environments, we are going to have to work with hundreds or even thousands of files of this type. Therefore, if a good part of these occupies a good number of megabytes, we will not have the possibility of storing them as a backup. Hence precisely the usefulness of the methods that we are going to show you below to significantly reduce the size of these files.
Ways to handle large Word files, easily
As it is easy to imagine, the texts in this program, and in the rest, do not weigh much, but the rest of the multimedia components do. And if we add to all this that we work with many files with these characteristics, this can represent a problem. If necessary, if what we want or need is to share these documents, send them by Internetor simply save them, we should take some measures.
One of the most logical is to try to reduce the size of these files, as far as possible. Therefore, to achieve what we propose, one of the premises that we must take into account in the first place is the format to be used. As many of you will already know first hand, as a general rule this Microsoft program makes use of the extensions DOC and DOCX.
The maximum size of a Word document also depends on the file format. Newer versions of Word use the DOCX format, while older versions use DOC. Say that the maximum file size for Word documents that only contain text is 32 megabytes, something valid for those created in Word 2007 and later.
At the same time, something that we should know is that the aforementioned DOCX file format internally carries out a better treatment of the stored contents. That is why when trying to save space and that the file as such weighs a little less, we use this type that we mentioned. In fact, many of the alternative office applications to Word are also migrating to DOCX in order to improve the experience of their users.
Watch the size of your documents
The truth is that that is a lot of space to use only text, but not so much if we include videos or images. And it is that by adding these elements to a file of this type, its maximum size can increase up to half a gig (512 megabytes). But as you can imagine, this is a weight for a document of word, somewhat exaggerated, so we should be careful when approaching this size. This size is extremely difficult to work with in the editor, especially if most of the Doc file contains images or videos.
Everything will also depend on the power of the equipment as such, or on the resources that Word has at its disposal at that moment. It is evident that in order to check the size of the document first hand, we can do this from the File Browser Windows. To check this without leaving Word, we can also do it from the File / Information menu option. Here we will see various information about the document, such as the authors, the number of words current or size.
In the same way, in the event that we work regularly with a large number of office files of this type, we can also use Windows Explorer itself. And it is that as most of you can imagine, it is enough that we mark all the Word files with which we are going to deal, in order to know the size of the set at a single glance. It is evident that the same can be done with the files of the word processor, but individually.
How to reduce the size of Word files
At this point, say that there are some ways to reduce the size of the Word document. This can be very useful if the file has become difficult to work with, crashes the program, or we plan to share it over the Internet. Thus, one of the fastest and most effective ways to achieve this is to convert old documents to the new format, DOCX. With this alone we should already see significant improvements in size. This is because the newer and more advanced DOCX files automatically compress any content additional, such as pictures.
To do this, we just have to open the document in Word and then click on File / Information / Convert, this option only appears with old versions of the Doc. Another point that we must take into consideration is the way in which we insert the images in The document. Saying that this is something that can also influence the size of the file. For example, if we paste the photos directly onto the page, Word converts them to the bmp format. Therefore, you have to know that this particular format is significantly larger than others such as JPEG.
Thus, it is recommended that we add them by hand from the Insert / Images menu, so that we can select an optimal format, such as the aforementioned JPEG. In addition, we must bear in mind that in most cases, the quality offered by the images saved in one format or another will be very similar. All this despite the sometimes significant difference in size of these photo files when going from BMP to JPG, so it will be worth the change.
Compresses the contents of documents
In the event that there are uncompressed files in the Doc we are working on, we always have the possibility to compress them all at once. This, as it is easy to think, will significantly optimize the size of the resulting files. To achieve this that we are discussing, first we go to the File / Save As / Tools menu option.
Here we are going to find the option we are looking for, called Compress images, where we click. Then a new window will appear where we already have the possibility to choose the image quality that we want to use for any photo of the document we are working on now.
In this way, in the event that we wish to obtain the smallest size of archive possible, we select 96 PPI. But of course, you have to know that in this case the images will look worse than originally. While in the previous point we told you that going from BMP to JPG was not going to hardly affect the quality of the images in the document, here it is different. Therefore, in this section we do have to be a little more careful, because it may be the case that some of these photos, if we compress them too much, stop being readable, which can be a problem. Therefore, we recommend you to try between the different compression levels exposed here to find the most appropriate in each case or the one that interests us the most.
Limit the use of certain content in documents
This is something that most of the rest of you probably already know from experience, especially since Word has not stopped improving over the years. We refer to the possibility of, as we have seen previously, working with a multitude of types of content in our documents. Whereas in the past these office software could only handle text, the situation has changed dramatically in recent years. At the moment in a program of text editing Like this we have the possibility of adding a multitude of contents, including multimedia.
That is precisely the key, or a good part of it, regarding the size of the final file that we are going to obtain in Word. We have already explained to you previously that the program It offers us a series of special functions to save space when saving the file. But in order for this to be as effective as possible, we ourselves also have to try to do our part. If we start from the assumption that in a document of this type we can add as many images as we want, even videos or objects imported from other applications, this is something that perhaps we should limit.
With this, what we want to tell you is that we must study how to use fewer photos, avoid the massive use of videos, etc. This is something that becomes especially evident in the event that we have in mind to share the new file that we are editing. Whether it’s to send via email, link in a website, or to work in a group, we must try to make the file light. In this way before uploading it to Internet we could waste a few minutes doing a general review and eliminating part of that multimedia content that perhaps is not as necessary as we might think at first. At the same time we can also join all this to the steps mentioned above.
Link images instead of adding them to the document
If the document we are creating includes a large number of images, images that must be displayed in the highest possible quality, the size of the Word document can reach several hundred MB in the best of cases, making it very difficult to share it through from an email. The best method to reduce the final size of this type of document is to link the images to the document instead of including them inside it. In this way, the Word document only will store the format and link to the location of the images which should be the same as where the file is located to avoid problems.
The first thing we must do is create a folder where we are going to save the document and where we are going to copy all the images that we want to link to the device. Next, we place the mouse on the image that we want to add, press the right mouse button and select Copy. Next, we go to the part of the document where we want to include it, click on Paste special, select Paste Link > Files and…
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