I have a finished document with ~150 photos which ended up bigger than 600MB. Word2007 saved it, but can not open - "Word can not open the file because it is larger than 512 megabytes"

any suggestions? computer can handle the file and Word made it, but now hours of work are stuck in the oversized .docx file (compatibility options on).

I have the same problem Using Word2007 have created a word document (consisting of photos and text) that is 743Mb in size i am now unable to open

get error Word cannot open this file because it is larger than 512 Megabytes i am unable to find a way around this is there a way to disable images and re-import the file or somthing - did you find a solution any help would be great thanks ..

You can do the following: Rename the file from .docx to .zip. Open it with the Windows Explorer and navigate to the subfolder word/media. There you will find your pictures. Delete at least some of the big ones to get under 512MB.

Rename back to docx and open with Word. Word will display some errors, because it can't find some files, just click Yes to recover the contents.

After that you will find placeholders for the images you deleted. Right-Click on them, choose "Change picture", select (just SELECT!) the picture on your local harddrive (better copy it to a directory under the Word document). Beside the Insert button you will find an arrow, click it and select "Link with file". After that, your file won't get bigger, but you will need the pictures to be beside the Word file.

It'sa best-practice from the old Word versions and seems to be valid for the new format too: Never include big images in the Word files!

• Marked as answer by SergejD Thursday, January 01, 2009 12:04 PM

I am also encountering the same error message, except that my Word 2007 document is a 1.22 GB. I created and SAVED a manual with 95 pageswith pictures in Word 2007 but now it cannot Open because of the size of the document. With the 512 mb limitations, can you help me to be able to save this document as a PDF and be able to open/print it too? Thanks!

Hi there

I'm having the same error message come up on my Word 2010 document (627MB - lots of photos pasted into the file) and have tried following the advice above but with no luck.  Any advice would be really appreciated, it's an important document!

- I couldn't rename the file from .docx to .zip so I did right-click, 'Send to', 'Compressed zip folder', which zipped it.  I then accessed the folder to try and find the subfolder 'word/media' that's mentioned above but the only item in that folder was the original file (which is still showing up as 612MB).

I'm a total technophobe so am probably doing it totally wrong, but any pointers would be very much appreciated.

Thank you!

Hi Elly,

Zipping the Word document doesn't help. You have to change the 'docx' extension to 'zip'. You will then be able to open the file with Windows Explorer and navigate to the subfolder word/media. Of course, to be able to change the  'docx' extension to 'zip', you need to have Windows Explorer's options set to show the extensions. For this, open Windows Explorer and go to Tools|Folder Options|View and uncheck the option for 'Hide extensions for known file types'.

Suppose the file is 925000 kilobytes and it needs to be edited.  Notepad takes about a 1/2 hour to open the file - Word not at all.  If there an alternate tool available to edit the file?  The RAM is maxing out anyway - how do I put it to

Hi there,

I followed your instruction and deleted some pictures. The problem is where to rename back from.zip to .docx?

Thanks

To prevent this problem at least on Mac Office 2011 to save the document in chunks as Different Files. and then put the titles in a Master Document?

Also once you can work on document go back to images and open in Canvas, GraphicConverter or Photoshop and reduce the file resolution by changing the images from 300dpi to no more that 75 or 150dpi and reduce the height and width to no more than 3"x5" or 4"x6" reducing size of images by physical size.

To prevent this problem at least on Mac Office 2011 to save the document in chunks as Different Files. and then put the titles in a Master Document?

You would only use Master Documents if you really don't care about losing the lot. See:
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/WhyMasterDocsCorrupt.htm
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/RecoverMasterDocs.htm
http://www.addbalance.com/word/masterdocuments.htm

If it is ms word file then we can open by following the steps below

atep 1: rename the file from .doc to .zip

step2: open with word pad

step3: complete text data we will get and copied part by part not whole then paste in ms word, you may loss some images

64-Bit Computer, 64GB RAM, 512MB Word Limit. Hogwash.  Fix the issue MS.