Hi,


I received a word doc of 30 pages. However, the size is only 50kB. How did they do that?

I just created a Word document of 56 pages that was 29kb. I added three levels of headings, paginated headers that changed with headings and a Table of Contents. That made it 30kb.

1) They formatted using styles.
2) They formatted using styles.
3) They did not include too many pictures.
4) Probably not a lot of section breaks.

Understanding Styles in Microsoft Word
Sections / Headers and Footers in Microsoft Word 2007-2016
Basic Concepts of Microsoft Word - from Shauna Kelly

Quoting myself from the first link:

I just had occasion to edit a 100-page document that
was created without using styles. It was formatted completely with
direct formatting. Each page ended with a page break.

Each time it had to be saved, the save took more than 60
seconds, during which time Word was frozen.

A similar-sized document formatted using Styles takes less than 3 seconds for me to save.
When a page break must be forced, instead of using a manual page
break, the paragraph to begin the new page is formatted using a
style that has "page break before" paragraph formatting.

This difference was due entirely to the document being directly
formatted - a much higher level of complexity. Each paragraph mark
in a directly-formatted paragraph carries with it up to fifty
different formatting commands. When formatted using a style, that
paragraph mark will carry with it one command - use this style!

Thank you, that was very helpful, though how 10 000 words could become 50kB is still magic to me, as are a lot of matters digital:-)

Compression algorithms. My document has 26,021 words.

Does Word do that automatically or do I need to format the doc for that?

The .docx format for documents is actually a form of the compressed zip folders used in Windows. So it applies the compression algorithms automatically. If I save that same document in .doc format, it is over 240k.

Again, though, if I start applying direct formatting, it will bloat the document because it will add complexity to the document structure.

I've uploaded my sample document in case anyone wants to look at it. I added an explanation of the formatting. It is now 63 pages with more than 26,000 words and under 35k in size. You can download it here.
Document formatted entirely using Styles

I just converted my document to mostly direct formatting with section breaks to allow for changes in the headers. The docx format moved to 50k from <35k. Still not the 240k of the .doc format.