Exponentially Growing Document???

  • Thread starter Thread starter Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore
  • Start date Start date
A

Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore

I had a file that was about 1.76MB. I have opened it and closed it
about 15-20 times over the course of about a week. I have not added all
that much to the file. In fact, I deleted quite a bit from it and added
stuff in its place. There aren't any images in the document. And I
have scanned it for viruses. The file is now 33MB.

What the hell is wrong with this thing???
 
Does this answer apply generally to all Office applications? I've
just come into this newsgroup to ask this same question, it happens
with word docs and excel spreadsheets, as I change the document it
gets progressively larger until finally a 500K document has turned
into a 50M monster that hangs the computer.

How do I stop this from happening?:

I highlight a phrase that I want to change the formatting (size,
colour, italics etc) and then the whole document changes
simultaneously. I then hit ctrl z to undo it and only the phrase I
want is changed. That wouldn't be a hassle except the file size
increases each time I do it and the undo step gets slower and slower
until finally the computer grinds to a standstill under the sheer
weight of the document. (The PC I'm using is a 2400 Pentium 4 with
512K of memory, running the latest version of Office XP Pro and
Windows XP Pro with all updates and service packs installed, so this
is not due to an underpowered PC).

From the list of things you mentioned, it sounds like "track changes"
could be the problem. I'm regularly dealing with documents that are
as much as 200 pages in length.

I also have this problem with Excel, files in Excel can also grow to
enormous size.

Travis
www.travismorien.com
Click to expand...

For your first problem, see this link:

http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/Formatting/WholeDocumentReformatted.htm

DM
 
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