Special Episode 2 (Part B): Compressing MS Word files (The Advanced Solution)

What we will learn today: How to reduce file size of MS WORD documents (The Advanced Solution).

  

Why this: Nearly all people who create documents on computer use MS WORD. In the Part A of this episode, we learned how to use The Simple Solution to compress MS WORD files, but sometimes it does not work (the file size is not significantly reduced). So, if we reduce the size of the original Word document, we will get very good results.

What is needed: MS WORD. Nothing else. And I hope you have MS OFFICE 2007 or a later version, as they have really cool features that you don’t want to miss. Visit Microsoft Store to purchase the latest office suite.

What you need to know: MS WORD 2007 and later introduced a new file format “.docx”; the files with ".docx" usually are already very small in size due to new MS OFFICE compression algorithms. So the main reasons for increased document size now are:

·         File format being other than “.docx” (eg. Rich Text Format ‘ .rtf’)

·         Or the presence of Hi-Res (high resolution) images.

Older versions use “.doc”, which is also not so efficient with file sizes. 

How to do it:

·         PART B: If you already have a “.docx” file which is large in size:

Now this is the tricky part, and I am sure very few people know about it. Usually if you have a “.docx” file with only text, it is very much small in size, except if it has pictures in it. Here is the solution of how to compress these types of file.

•   Open the file in MS WORD.
•   Select any picture, you will see a “Pictures Tools” button above “Format” tab. Click on it, and then select “Compress Pictures”.

• You will now see;

• Select “Apply only to this picture” if you want to compress only the selected picture, if you want to compress all the pictures in the document, un-check it.
• Select “Delete cropped areas of picture” if you have cropped regions in the picture.
• Select the desired resolution, the less PPI (Pixels Per Inch), the lesser file size, but it can make your pictures blur, so as always there’s a trade-off.
• Click “OK”. And then save the file. Congrats you will have a reduced file size now.

An even more advanced option:

"Note": The method listed below should always be used in drastic situations, as it is not reversible, do this if your document is finalized and you don’t intend to change it (e.g. you finished a document, now you just want to email it). Save a backup before doing this.

MS WORD saves additional data related to the documents; I will save you the details (you can always visit MS WORD “Help” for more info). You can discard them to make file size much smaller.

•  Click the “File” tab.
• Under “Help”, click “Options”, and then click “Advanced”. 
• Next to “Image Size and Quality”, click the file that you want to remove picture editing data from. 
• Under “Image Size and Quality”, select the “Discard editing data” check box.
• Click “Ok”.

This is the smallest file size possible without using any zipping or splitting software.
You can convert this ".docx" into PDF for further reduction, and you can always apply PDF file-size reduction tricks!

What’s next? Did I just mention a few sentences above to convert your word document into PDF? Do you know how to do that? Do not worry, I will give you all the methods of how to convert MS Word document to PDF document. As always I will keep things simple and non-fussy.