WORD formatting - how to remove???

Good afternoon.

As I have upgraded hardware and software over the years, I have noticed that Word documents keep getting larger and larger; a document that may have been 15 kb is now 100+ kb (and larger).

While modern harddrives are much larger, I just don't need all the default formatting that seems to be present.

It seems that there is a lot of background, automatic formatting that I neither need or want.

Can anybody suggest just how to start trimming these files down to size?

Thanks for your time.