QUESTION: How do I reduce document size in Word 2003 to the much
smaller size of Word 2000?

HISTORY: I have some large files (say 350+ pages, 1.7mb) in Word 2000
that I and others in my group regularly update. Every time we update,
we save under a new version name and the new files soon are copied
throughout the network, so we generate a lot of big files.  But I
recently upgraded one computer in the network to MS Office 2003. Files
saved in Word 2003 are more than twice the size (say 4.3mb for the
file that was 1.7mb in Word 2000), and that is the problem. When these
Word 2003 files are opened and saved in Word 2000, they revert to the
original smaller size.

I may have made some bad choices in setting up Word 2003, I'm not sure
(the machine its on had crashed and I had to re-install Win XP
Professional, and took the opportunity to upgrade Word. But all my old
settings from Word 2000 were lost.)  I did what I thought was a
default installation but its from a site-licensed disk and my
organization conceivably made some odd choice (our IT person is not
very knowledgeable).

Details about the files: (1) There are no graphics, so no issue of
compression for them. (2) There are no unusual fonts ? but I don't
understand about "font embedding", so possibly there is something
there. (3) I now have "revision tracking" turned off, and have
"accepted" all revisions and re-saved.  I did have revision tracking
on for a while when first editing the worst of the big files, however.
 (4) There is a lot of hidden text.   (5) If I start a new file in
Word 2003 and import the materials from a Word 2000 file, that makes
no difference to the file size problem.
I have no need for any features new to Word 2003 and, so far as I
know, don't use them. If Word 2003 is doing something new ? for
example, for the internet ? I would probably be happy to turn the
feature off in return for smaller file size.

Help!

You could try 

In tools, options, Save Tab deselect "Allow Fast Saves" 
"Fast Saves" stores all changes/deletions that you have made 

Basically, goto Options | Save and turn off all the backup/save options.

HTH

Sounds like you'd enjoy this article - if it helps, all the better.

How to Make Word 2003 Workable:
http://www.computorcompanion.com/LPMArticle.asp?ID=199

Regards,
hummer

A couple of things occur to me:

First, make sure you save as Word 2000 format rather than just "Word
document" (it wasn't clear whether you are doing this already).

Also, I wonder whether it's started using 16-bit Unicode for all your
text or something silly like that. That would naturally lead to a
roughly doubled file size. You said there was a lot of hidden text.
Can you characterise it? Is it interspersed throughout the document,
or clumped? Are the individual fragments short or long? Does it
correspond to anything you can recognise?

Make sure you turn off smart tags, too.