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Why Word documents opened and saved in Pages have larger file sizes?

Hello to all! I have been cautiously sticking to running my iMac on Mojave and one of the reasons for the hesitation to upgrade has been the loss of my Word documents. However, viewing the relentless progress being made by Apple, I am beginning to feel the nudge to upgrade to at least Big Sur, intending to abandon good old MS Word for good and patronising Pages for my writing flair. Before doing this I decided to know for myself whether the Pages app running on my latest M1 MackBook Air [on Big Sur] would be able to open my old Word documents. Pages did open the documents and I saved one document as Pages document. What surprised me was this: The MS Word document was only 200 Kbs whereas the same document saved as a Pages document was 4 times larger: above 850 Kbs!

Is such a large sized documents common to documents created in Pages? Sending you the screenshots of both the documents. Wish to know about the implications of such large sized files as authors will have to plan for larger storage devices to store their data.

Regards

Dr. Somanna








Posted on May 21, 2022 3:03 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on May 21, 2022 6:41 AM

Word documents are neither 32-bit nor 64-bit and yes, the current versions of Word will open older Word documents from years ago. The current Microsoft applications are 64-bit as required by macOS Catalina through Monterey and beyond.

6 replies

May 21, 2022 3:17 AM in response to somanna

Because Pages is not a Word clone, and when you open a Word document in Pages, it is translated into the internal Pages .pages document format — without changing the original Word document — and is a different, larger document format by design. And there is another translation process on export back to Word document format. Apple does not guarantee these translations to be accurate, or produce smaller documents as a result.


If you want to open/edit/save Word documents in their native document format on Mac, then you need a currently supported version of MS Office on your Mac for that purpose.

May 21, 2022 5:07 AM in response to VikingOSX

Thanks for this detailed and clear information. The current MS version offered is the 365 Microsoft that is not a one time purchase but is a subscription based one. It is because of the financial constraints involved that I am minded to adopt Pages for my future works should I upgrade my iMac to Big Sur.

Regards

Dr. Somanna

May 21, 2022 6:23 AM in response to VikingOSX

Thanks for this further information that I could not find in my search for this problem. Does this application open old Word (32-bit) documents? Does it allow one to seamlessly continue with the MS Word ? I have read of the 365 Microsoft causing troubles to those who have upgraded to Big Sur. If it’s available, would the Word Office 2021 be stable in Big Sur?

Why Word documents opened and saved in Pages have larger file sizes?

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