Word documents, size of

[trastevere]

I'll try to explain as simply as possible. In the course of my work I have sets of three A4 pages emailed to me by a researcher. In turn , I attach these as an 'attachment' to various emails I send out to other people. In the past these pages have never exceeded 1Mb. Always much lower. I now have a new researcher and the same pages are coming through at 5.6MB. which take too long to download. What could be the reason for the file being ten times bigger yet text /picture content is the same. Basically, the same text page is used as a template but new colour pictures have to be inserted. Any help appreciated because I need to know a bit about it in order take matter further with computer savvy colleagues

[fo3nix]

The images are likely being attached at a higher quality, and thus higher file size.

[vehelpfulguy]

The most common image file types are GIF, JPEG and BMP (bitmap).

Bitmap are by far the largest and if they are inserting bitmaps that will account for the large size.

JPEG and GIF are usually both smaller, but they can be made smaller yet by reducing their quality (which may not be noticable to the human eye).

You can reduce picture quality (and hence size) in any decent image editing program.

[ACtheTROLL]

presumably your researcher uses PrtSc or Alt+PrtSc and paste.

this little prog isn't particularly fancy ... but it's small, easy to use and saves small screenshots...
http://www.mirekw.com/winfreeware/mwsnap.html

[4candles]

I'm assuming these attachments are .doc files. If so, activate the 'Pictures' toolbar in Word, and click on 'Compress Pictures'. You'll get a self-explanatory dialogue box to choose your options, and the file size will be dramatically reduced.

Please repost if more detail required.

[webdude]

Microsoft always uses vast amounts of memory when either creating programs or data files used in their products.

If a Word document contains any images, it will increase the resulting file size appreciable, especially if the image/s used are high resolution. Word has the ability to automatically downsize images when they are inserted into a document, depending on which method you use to place them. In addition, Word also allows the user to re-size an image by dragging with the mouse, however the original (large) file is still stored in the Word document, and will occupy a large amount of memory even after re-sizing on the page.

The solution is to strip out any unwanted or unnecessary images, including logos etc, in the document, or ideally re-sample all images in image editor before using them in Word.