by
Tim Mangan
Like probably many of you, I have been using Office 2007 for quite a while now. In my case it has been over a year, but then I am a bleading edge kind of guy on these things. But this week I added an employee and she brought her own laptop which, of course, has Office 2003 installed. So when she needed a document I was working on but haddn't put up on the server, I tried to mail it to her.
Naturally, she got the document and complained she could read it. I thought about telling her to download the patch on her machine, but instead I just opened it back up on mine and did a "save as word 2000-2003" operation and mailed that. Several hours later she asked me when I was going to get around to sending her the document again.
Look in my email outbox, and there it is. Still trying to send. What do I find? This 20MB document became a 100MB document when saved in the old format! Thinking back, I had seen this bloat before with PowerPoint, I pushed it out of my mind because that was the beta version and assumed there was no way they would release the product like that. I guess I was wrong!
If you are thinking, well maybe they just got really good with the new file format. No. It was a small document (24 pages, with a bit of graphics) that surely would not have been more than 20MB if I had written it originally in 2003, and probably less. So if you have a mixed office environemt you are going to have to pay attention to this bloat. Users should probably be encouraged to convert at the recipient rather than what I did.
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