OpenOffice to the rescue

October 24, 2006

Speaking of writing, OpenOffice.org saved my butt today. A large Microsoft Word document I was working on ballooned to over 300M, making even the autosave feature take over 10 minutes (I’m not exaggerating). Finally, in frustration, I opened up the document in OpenOffice.org Writer, finished my editing, and then saved it back to Word. The new file size? 1M and everything ran smoothly. I have no idea what I was doing wrong to have Word behave this way, but thank you OpenOffice for saving the day. To this point, I haven’t had much of a chance to use the software as I was just too stuck in Word. After today, I’ll give it another look.

  • http://www.leathern.com Rob Leathern

    That’s pretty amazing – I’ve never had a Word doc get that big though plenty of errant excel files of 30-60Mb slowing my computer to a crawl… what were you putting in there is what I’m curious about?

  • http://www.tmarkiewicz.com Tom Markiewicz

    Good question. I actually figured it out what may have been causing the problem. I was adding images to the doc that were in png format instead of my usual gif or jpg. This is the only difference between other documents and this one.

Previous post:

Next post: