I am working with a document that has swollen to an unimaginable 66MG. I am sure the developer took the screen shots and pasted them in directly from the clipboard. I've read that graphics inserted this way are bitmaps, which is a large file format.

But I've never seen a document grow this big with 24 screen shots.



I found a reference to an MS article (Article ID: 224663) that said that when you save a file to a different file format, (we are using Word 2007, but saving all docs as 2003 for our customer), "when the document is saved, two copies of the graphic are saved in the document. Graphics are saved in the applicable EMF, PNG, GIF, or JPEG format and are also converted to WMF (Windows Metafile) format." (The article recommended making a registry change, which is not practical for us.)

Does anyone know if this is still true and therefore might be the cause of the huge file size? And would our saving as Word 2003 rather than native docx be the cause?

I know the solution is to convert the screen shots to another graphic format and I have a macro that Paul Edstein gave me that works perfectly, but I'd like to know more about the source of the problem before lobbying our developers/authors to use the macro.