Why can't I print this huge Word doc?

If you make a Word document and embed lots of photos in it, it may become too big to print/attach/etc. The best thing to do is to reduce the sizes of the images in a separate program, BEFORE you put them in the Word doc. However, if you can't or don't want to "rebuild" the document, there is another way.

In the example below, the Get Info box (File menu -> Get Info) shows the file size to be about 43MB. That's pretty big. A typical Word document with just a few pages of text is under 1 MB.

1. If the file is a .doc then you need to first turn it into a .docx file. Go to File and choose Save As... and pick the first option, "Word Document (.docx)"

2. You may get a warning like this, click OK.

3. Go to the File menu and choose "Reduce File Size..."

4. Choose "Best for viewing on screen (150 ppi)" and check the box for "Remove cropped picture regions."

5. Make sure to Save so that it actually applies the file size reduction.

6. Doing a Get Info on the resulting file shows that it is now only 2.5MB, which is much better!