File Sizes in Word

If you have been a long-time Word user, you may have noticed that file sizes for Word documents have grown over the years. To examine how versions have affected file sizes, we did some testing. We created the exact same document in the last four versions of Word. In each case, the document contained only a single character: a space. The results are as follows:

As you can see, the files are quite large when you consider that only a single character is being saved in the document. (They growth is really amazing if you look back to Word 6, where the size for the same file was only 9,216 bytes.) For most users, this growth in document file sizes from one version to the next won't affect them much. The size differences appear to be related to additional features introduced with each new version, and the data that must be saved with the document for that feature.

One anomaly is the large increase in file size from Word 2000 to Word 2002, and then the reduction in file size from Word 2002 to Word 2003. Further testing will be necessary to figure out why this change took place.