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I have a simple problem. For some document, a custom image was used as a token for it's bullets. At that time, it just looked nice, even though the image itself was quite large. (The bullet itself ended up being resized to normal size, but the original image was at 640x640.) However, after plenty of modifications to the document, it was decided to remove this custom bullet again. So the document now uses regular bullets.

But right now, the whole document had about 8 pages of text. But these 8 pages are in a document that's nearly 8 megabytes! Way too much for a simple document.

It has some formatting that I will lose if I try to convert it to RTF and back again, so I won't do this. Tried it, made me weep. Besides, I think such drastic measures should not even be required!

I expect the document still keeps a copy of the bullet image somewhere. How do I clean the document by just using Word?

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  • I know there's a way to strip some or all of the meta data in a document. Unfortunately I don't have Word2003 available to check on it. Have you checked the options in File > Properties ?
    – ale
    Dec 9, 2009 at 18:01
  • Checked the properties, found nothing helpful yet. Dec 10, 2009 at 14:55

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The classic way to clean/repair a Word document is to copy all but the last paragraph mark into a new Word document. This method will save most of your text formatting. However, you will probably need to re-do or fix your headers/footers, especially if you have sections.

(I assume you've already reset the bullet & numbering styles? I don't know if Word 2007 has this possibility, but in earlier versions, there's a reset button in the bottom right corner of the "gallery" of list styles.)

Edit: I was browsing around for something entirely unrelated, and found this remove hidden data add-in for Office 2002 or 2003/XP. For Office 2007, you can use the Document Inspector to achieve the same thing.

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  • Tried the reset, which resets the bullets. It just doesn't remove the image from the document. Dec 10, 2009 at 14:55
  • Did you try the "all but the last paragraph mark" trick yet?
    – Martha
    Dec 10, 2009 at 14:59
  • Tried it, seems to work. (It's back at 55 KB.) But it somehow feels wrong to create a new document to clean it up... Dec 11, 2009 at 11:37

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