Microsoft Word documents--space?

Ask MS: http://www.officeformac.com/ProductForums/Word/

You could upgrade the hard drive.
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-drives/2.5-Notebook/
http://www.barefeats.com/note03.html

You could make OS X as small as possible and run Windows XP.

So 120GB is too cramped? have you looked to see if there are 10GB of applications and support files you don't need in OS X?

Is this Office 2008 for Mac? full or custom install?

How about a small 2.5" USB/FW external drive to off load files.

I wouldn't worry about it until you had less than 10 Gig of space free. I suspect you have much more than that available now.

Also, the size of a file, especially small ones, is not always what you think it is. For small files like this, the "size" of the file is actually the number of "blocks" that the file takes up on disk. Each filesystem handles such files differently. Those two files may be exactly the same size, but take up more space on MacOS X due to HFS+.

An extreme example of this is with USB thumb drives that use FAT16. Take a directory of small files that takes up 512 MB and try to copy it to a 1 Gig flash drive. I bet it won't fit.

Also, Word 2008 constructs documents differently on the Mac than on Windows. As you add images to files, you will continue to see a similar difference in size based on how Word 2008 is different on MacOS X. This will happen with much larger files.

The cheapest Macbook you can buy would store about 1.3 million of those 80 KB Word documents.

The cheapest Macbook you can buy would store about 1.3 million of those 80 KB Word documents.

Exactly. Yes, it's bigger than what you're seeing in Windows, but it's still a teeny file. You aren't going to run out of room for years if those are about the only files you save to the hard drive.

You might want to do a test of your files. There are other programs that read and either write or export to Word doc format.

Your question reminded me of when I use to use a word processor and 400k and later 1.2k floppies, when they upgraded to version 3, files all of a sudden started requiring 5k or something and had me worried about being able to fit on floppy to take some where to have it laser printed, or running out of space on 40MB disk drive.


I think Apple's Pages format is the largest due to the nature of its package format. At least those I worked in and converted to OpenOffice were about 2x larger.

I have 5-10 thousand documents in OpenOffice that take up less than 5GB, and OOo has its own optimized compression format (don't know exactly what it is) but it takes any rtf file and saves in 1/3 of the disk space it was. Documents range form 20 pages to 400+ and take 40k up to 3MB.
http://www.openoffice.org/

I'm sure you will be just fine. Just check to be sure your disk drive has 10-20% free space if possible, and things like Safari can build up a lot of history and temp files, caches that use 50MB quite easily and quickly.

If you do want a larger/faster drive, and put your original in 2.5" case, that is handy. One thing I see a lot is to get people to have and use a bootable external drive with OS X for maintenance and repairs. In addition to TimeMachine which also needs a backup drive.

nbrown2 wrote:
on a PC, my average Word documents (using Windows XP) took up about 36 KB of space. I am now writing my first essay on my new Mac and have found that after only a paragraph, this document is 80 KB! Why is this so much bigger than on Windows??

It is possible that the Mac version stores more metadata than the Windows version, so that there's more overhead. But that may not be the only reason...

Can you do something for me. Highlight the Word file in its folder, and choose File/Get Info. You will see two numbers for Size. It will say "_ KB on dis ( _ bytes)"

What do yours say, and can you move the file to Windows and check the size in Properties? Here's what I'm getting at.

I have a Word file and I'm going to check the sizes now on Mac and Windows.
On the Mac:

24 KB on disk (20,992 bytes)

In Windows XP, the same file as reported by Properties:

Size: 20.5 KB (20,992 bytes)
Size on disk: 32.0 KB (32,768 bytes)

Again, that's the same file. Here is what is going on:
Every file has two "sizes." One is the size of the file, and the other is the space it occupies on disk. What's the difference? Suppose you have a jetliner, a child, and a fat guy. How much space do they take up? By area, the child is much smaller than the fat guy. As far as the airline is concerned, though, both take up the same space: One seat each.

Your disk is divided into blocks. If a file needs less than a block, it must take the whole block anyway. Let's apply that to the size readouts above. There are two sizes reported on Mac and Windows, "Size" and "Size on disk."

"Size" is the *actual size*, or the size of the file itself. On Mac and Windows, *this is the same*: 20,992 bytes, or around 20.5 KB (that is, 20,992/1024 bytes to a kilobyte). On the Mac, it's the second number. On Windows, it's the first set of numbers.

"Size on disk" is the size on the block size of the drive as currently formatted. On the Mac, it's 24 KB. On Windows, it's 32 KB. Why is this different? Because one hard drive is formatted one way, and the other drive was formatted the other way. It would be like how First Class has fewer seats than Coach Class on an airplane, so in First Class where the seats are bigger, a single person uses up more of the cabin. My guess is that my Mac drive was formatted with 8 KB blocks so it rounds up to 24 KB, and my Windows XP drive is formatted with 16 KB blocks so it rounds up to 32 KB.

So what I'm getting at is it's possible your file may not really be bigger on the Mac, but the drive may be formatted differently than on your PC, affecting how the file size rounds up.

Another possible answer, I don't know about Word for Windows, but on the Mac, if you have Allow Fast Saves turned on, files can really bloat up more than they should, best to turn it off.

Still, anything under a megabyte is considered tiny these days.

*I am now writing my first essay on my new Mac and have found that after only a paragraph, this document is 80 KB!*
But it doesn't mean that two paragraphs will be 160KBs. Right now I don't have any big Word documents, but a 14 pages document I found on my hard drive is 120KBs.

*Why is this so much bigger than on Windows?*
Word 2008 documents are slightly bigger than Word 2004 (or 2003 on Windows) because the format changed. Much of the space is filed with info about the document and it should the same size if you typed it on Word 2007. Anyway, here is one way of reducing the doc size:
1- Go to Word > Preferences…
2- Choose Save
3- Uncheck the *Save preview picture with new document* option