I used 2007 Word to compose the original documents. I saved them as *.doc and they were approximately 45KB. I opened them months later and deleted one word, then just hit the SAVE icon which then would have kept the *.doc format. When I checked the size of the newly saved documents, they had all more than doubled in size to nearly 118KB (after deleting a word!).

As an experiment, I took these now-large files and saved them as *.docx, and they returned to a small file size of about 44KB.

Saving files in *.doc format means to me that more people will be able to read them if they have older versions of Word. That is why I use it.

Thanks for any help.