MS Office file size unusually large

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MS Office file size unusually large

I have a PC at work and a Mac at home. I brought home a Power Point and modified it on my Mac. The file size grew tremendously after working on it on the mac. The file was not large at work, then after I worked on it on the Mac it grew to 12 MB! It is not a loaded Power Point by any means. Mostly text with a few graphics. I just created a new Word document on my Mac as well. I tried to email it and realized that it was very large too. The document had some text and one small picture...the file was 7 MB! Something's not right. What is going on? Any ideas?

Mac OS X (10.4.11)

Posted on Nov 7, 2008 3:52 PM

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Answer 1

Axel Foley

Level 10

150,984 points

Nov 7, 2008 4:16 PM in response to aspratl

Asparatl:

Welcome to the Apple Discussions:

I am not sure which versions of Powerpoint for Mac you have at home and which version of Powerpoint for PC you have at work. So, I am going to have to assume a few things while trying to answer your query.

One primary reason why Powerpoint files bloat is when using an earlier version of Powerpoint or saving as an earlier version. Powerpoint 2007 for PC and 2008 for Mac are the only current versions that actually compress images. All of the earlier versions do not.

So, If you have MS Office 2008 for Mac at home and MS Office 2004 (earlier than 2007) and you choose "Save as" on your Mac to an earlier version to work at your office then you will not have compressed the images and then file would appear to be bloated.

The other reason why this could be happening regardless of version(s) in use is how you insert images in powerpoint. If you simply copy/paste or drag/drop images and it is in a metafile format then those are huge. Try and use JPG images.

Finally what comes to mind is images inserted via the Clip Gallery into PowerPoint 97 cause a much larger file size jump than do the same images inserted via Insert, Picture, From File.

Axel F.

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