Size of RTF increasing 10x after minor edit

[ijayk66]

We are running into a strange issue while working with .



• the size of the RTF is 6 MB.
• But with a very little change like deleting a row or adding a few letters, when we save the RTF the size is getting increased to about 56 MB.
• Apparently this is issue with MS Word and how it stores the data in RTF.


Microsoft® Word for Microsoft 365 MSO (16.0.14326.20782) 64-bit
Version 2108(Build 14326.20784)

[Peterson]

No idea why that's happening, but you could try using WordPad, which works on .rtf files and is included with Win10.

[ijayk66]

We have a lot of charts and images that wont be supported by wordpad

[Peterson]

Microsoft is claiming that they fixed "serious performance issues" with RTF files in Version 2108 (Build 14326.20738), January 11 (Release notes for Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel releases - Office release notes | Microsoft Docs). If you're not in IT, you might ask your IT dept. to submit a ticket to MSFT. You could also try rolling back to an earlier version, but that's a bit of a pain. Also, what happens if you save the file as a .docx, make revisions, then save as .rtf?

[Guessed]

What happens if you save it back to docx format? Can you then resave as RTF to get back to the original size?

[Peterson]

Another thought: If the file has somehow been set to embed fonts, and there are several different ones, then that will make the file size go way up, fast, without doing much of anything to it. A 30KB .rft test file with, literally, 20 words but three embedded font families, went up to ~10 MB.