Re: Word 2007 produces very large Word 2003 compatible files

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"Tony Jollans" <My forename at my surname dot com> wrote in message news:#C7cthcdJHA.5904@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
The setting varies depending on your operating system. If using Vista then the "Preview Picture" option is application specific. If you turn it on the default for all new documents will also save a preview picture (thumbnail). If using Windows XP then it's still a document only setting.

Very interesting. So, Word deliberately checks the OS and performs different actions depending on it - even though those actions could both work on all systems. Do you know: why the change, and why only on Vista? And is there anything else like it?

If you are using Vista the option in the dialog box is named differently. I don't have access to Vista right now to give you the exact wording but it's along the lines of "Always save preview thumbnail". I'm not 100% certain but I believe the file properties dialog box comes from the os rather than Word. That's what I've always thought this anyway since we can't programmatically display the file properties dialog box using VBA and the reason why they added the File Summary dialog box. (Of course I could easily be wrong about this.)

I don't know if there are similar changes in other dialog boxes aside from the file system dialog boxes. For example there's also a "Save Thumbnail" option in the Save As dialog box on Vista and the standard file properties, such as Subject, Title, Author, etc are included too. It makes it easy to deselect the Thumbnail option and modify the other properties when you're saving the file.

The main reasons for these additions is SharePoint and the new Vista search and organize features. For example you can group or "stack" files in a folder by the various file properties and there's a heavy emphasis on viewing thumbnails of files in Vista as well.

Also, documents saved in the new file format (.docx) shouldn't encounter the file bloat issues as found in the binary file format. I say "should" because so far in all of my tests it hasn't. Mainly this is because the thumbnail is saved as a small graphic in the ZIP package instead of the (usually) large embedded image (sometimes 2 images depending on the image file type) saved in the old file format.

Also interesting. By and large, 2007 format documents are large compared to 97-2003 format ones but they're kept small by being zipped. In this example, the 220K doc will zip to 50K or so but the 2007 format gains its advantage by being small to start with because of the small metafile compared to the 'clipboard format' bitmap of yore.

I've also found the size of the thumbnail that's saved still depends on whether an image is also being saved in the thumbnail, if the document was newly created in the new file format and saved as .docx verses a originally saved as a *.doc and converted to *.docx. And I believe the thumbnail that's saved in the *.docx file might be a little smaller, and stored as a different file type, if you are using Vista. I'd have to check this out again to be sure but I'm fairly certain that's what I found a couple years ago. Hopefully someone will correct me if I'm wrong. :-)

Also regarding the binary format, as I'm sure you know, if you include images in a document Word may actually save two images in the file depending on the image type (note this doesn't apply to the preview picture option). I don't recall which one(s) cause the doubling of images saved off hand, and I think they corrected many of these issues, but I seem to recall there's one file type (an older file type) that still exhibits the behavior. Like the preview picture these are no longer issues in the new file format based on my tests during the beta. This is an area I spent some time testing in light of the file bloat we've encountered in the past due to images both embedded in the file and the embedded preview picture.
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP
https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile/Melton
What is a Microsoft MVP? http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/gp/mvpfaqs

Guides for the Office 2007 Interface:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/training/HA102295841033.aspx


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