MS Word - Saving As RTF Increases Filesize

[Moozik: OMD - Pretending To See The Future]

I have to use Microsoft Word for various work and University related documents. Unfortunately as much as I'd like to think openoffice's writer or Abiword are ready for prime time, they're not *quite* there yet. When everyone around you is using MS Word you notice little subtle formatting differences and quirks that are a deal breaker. Still the open source replacements are not far behind so I like to think that one day I can use one of them 100% of the time. But I digress, back to the point of this blog post.

I stumbled across an interesting problem today. For a University assignment, my professor wanted a copy in Rich Text Format (.rtf). The document in question contained a number of photos that I had taken and I had already saved it as a .doc file. The filesize of the document was already quite a hefty 409KB. After saving as a .rtf file the filesize ballooned to 11MB. Surely that can't be right. After trying the operation a couple more times I concluded that it was in fact right.

The answer as to why that happened and what to do about it can be found here

According to an article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base, "if an EMF, a PNG, a GIF, or a JPEG graphic is inserted into a Word document, 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."

To resolve the problem, you can specify a registry setting that keeps Word from saving two copies of the image.

Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Software > Microsoft > Office > Version > Word > Options. Create a new StringValue called ExportPictureWithMetafile and set it to 0. Et voila. Problem solved, saving as .rtf file now results in a much more manageable 604KB. Still a beast but better than 11MB. I'll take it.