I was just wondering if anyone out there knew much about MS Word's old
file format. I'm just wondering why the new XML-based file formats in
Office 12 are smaller; one would expect them to be bigger if the old
binary format were at all efficient because the new format has the
inefficiency of having to use more verbose XML <tags>. It's shocking
how much smaller the new files are. Is there an article that you know
of anywhere that would explain what all of the space was being wasted
on with the old documents?

Thanks,

One curious new Office 12 user

Hi Josh,

With a lot of graphic (binary) content the files in Office 2007 OpenXML dopeocument format can be larger. With just text, the XML
files are zipped, and those compress very well.

The background on these is at http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones
Brian Jones is the program manager for MS Office' XML.

Other MS sites with information include
http://openxmldeveloper.org
http://msdn.microsoft.com/office

============
<<"Josh Prowse" <prowsej******.com> wrote in message news:1174936880.486199.57060@n59g2000hsh.googlegro ups.com...
I was just wondering if anyone out there knew much about MS Word's old
file format. I'm just wondering why the new XML-based file formats in
Office 12 are smaller; one would expect them to be bigger if the old
binary format were at all efficient because the new format has the
inefficiency of having to use more verbose XML <tags>. It's shocking
how much smaller the new files are. Is there an article that you know
of anywhere that would explain what all of the space was being wasted
on with the old documents?

Thanks,

One curious new Office 12 user >>
--

Bob Buckland ?:-)
MS Office System Products MVP

*Courtesy is not expensive and can pay big dividends*