My file size has grown to 65 meg

[BobHewson]

I am using Office 2007 with Word 8.0, Win 7, and lots of memory and HD space.



I have a newsletter which contains many jpeg pictures. The pictures were inserted one by one, sized, and border applied, then compressed as a group rather than individually. There are both color and B&W pictures. I have followed my procedure many times in the past, successfully. My expected file size was 2 - 3 meg, not the 63 meg I have.

I have been unable to find any techniques on the net to resolve problem. I have converted the file to a PDF and file size is just over 1 meg in size. I have tried re-saving with a new name, copying content to a new file, modifying regedit to stop saving an extra copy of picture (found by a Microsoft forum query).

None of these have resulted in a smaller file size.

Any suggestions and perhaps an explanation of what has happened to cause this would be appreciated.

Bob

[mike.smith]

Hello BobHewson,

as you have correctly pointed out the problem is in your pictures, they are just too big.

So first of all, try to resave all of your pictures into png format. This format offers best ratio between quality and size and is usually smaller than jpg format.

The second thing you should do is to resize your pictures directly in your graphic editor. When you resize pictures in word, you change their dimensions but you do not change their KB size so despite they are small they take a lot of space.

So change dimensions in graphics editor, save it and then paste in your word document.

And let me know how it went. :-)

mike

[BobHewson]

Thanks Mike,

I will try the different picture file type in my next newsletter.

Still not sure of the cause though. When I use my technique I have been inserting full size jpeg picture files of 1 - 5 meg each, resizing in Word, setting text wrapping in Word, then compressing the picture size all using Word. The final doc file size has been ~1meg, never more than 2meg despite having inserted up to 50 meg of pictures (at regular size).

The current newsletter has more pictures than I normally use (about 50), so perhaps there is a limit of pictures that can be compressed in one file?

I did try removing about 1/2 of the pictures by deleting them, but the file size remained at 63 meg. The pictures I cut out and moved to another file plus added more is only 2 meg in saved form.

So, as you can see there may be more to this problem.

Bob

[mike.smith]

Hm,

did you use some template or did you build your newsletter from the scratch?

Maybe you can post it to the forum so I can have a look at it.

Mike

[BobHewson]

Hi Mike,

My newsletter is essentially built from scratch, the basic format and headers are "canned".

Its not practical to put the 63 meg file on line, but if you want to see it in it's converted to pdf format check our Guild's website at

http://www.thamesvalleywoodturners.com/newsletter.html

The newsletter in question is March April 2010.

I'd be happy to forward one of the smaller newsletters direct since there is a size limit on the forum. If acceptable send me your email by Priv Message

Bob

[mike.smith]

So we have solved the problem.

The problem were pictures, that were too large. What we did to fix it is that we copied them from MS Word to PaintBrush and then simply copied them back.

The file size has decreased to 4,5 megs.

So you all others just know. :-)

mike

[BobHewson]

A grateful thanks to Mike for his help resolving my problem!

Bob