That's a LOT of hidden data...
Or, how you can use the Office Remove Hidden Data tool to compress your Word documents.
Recently I've been spending a lot of time editing Word documents with other people. This typically requires a final pass to… harmonize… the different format styles that people use. After the latest session of removing visible gunk, I got to wondering whether the new Remove Hidden Data tool could get rid of the physical gunk. A quick experiment with five different Word documents from various sources shows that yes, yes it can:
| Document | Before HiddenData Removal | After HiddenData Removal | CompressionRatio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Word doc #1 | 0.24 MB | 0.17 MB | 1.4 x |
| Word doc #2 | 0.39 MB | 0.15 MB | 2.6 x |
| Word doc #3 | 1.17 MB | 0.44 MB | 2.7 x |
| Word doc #4 | 1.37 MB | 0.33 MB | 4.2 x |
| Word doc #5 | 3.00 MB | 0.51 MB | 5.9 x |
Fair warning: the tool happily consumed >10 minutes of CPU time on a 3 GHz Xeon for #5, and it marks the resulting file as read-only. But a compression ratio of up to 6-to-1 is not to be sniffed at!
"The Remove Hidden Data tool: it's not just for security anymore"
Update: There's a new version of the tool available, which promises “substantially increased” performance (via Roberdan)