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That's a LOT of hidden data...

  • Artikel

Or, how you can use the Office Remove Hidden Data tool to compress your Word documents.

Recently I've been spending a lot of time editing Word documents with other people. This typically requires a final pass to… harmonize… the different format styles that people use. After the latest session of removing visible gunk, I got to wondering whether the new Remove Hidden Data tool could get rid of the physical gunk. A quick experiment with five different Word documents from various sources shows that yes, yes it can:

Document Before HiddenData Removal After HiddenData Removal CompressionRatio
Word doc #1 0.24 MB 0.17 MB 1.4 x
Word doc #2 0.39 MB 0.15 MB 2.6 x
Word doc #3 1.17 MB 0.44 MB 2.7 x
Word doc #4 1.37 MB 0.33 MB 4.2 x
Word doc #5 3.00 MB 0.51 MB 5.9 x

 

Fair warning: the tool happily consumed >10 minutes of CPU time on a 3 GHz Xeon for #5, and it marks the resulting file as read-only. But a compression ratio of up to 6-to-1 is not to be sniffed at!

"The Remove Hidden Data tool: it's not just for security anymore"

Update: There's a new version of the tool available, which promises “substantially increased” performance (via Roberdan)

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 27, 2004
    Hey, the link doesn't work!
  • Anonymous
    April 27, 2004
    yea, no workie...and it's less than 10 hours old...

    update the link, eh?
  • Anonymous
    April 27, 2004
    Fixed - I blame BlogJet :)
  • Anonymous
    April 29, 2004
    One question: Would, at the end of a drafting and re-drafting exercise, saving a document as rtf, closing and reopening it, then saving it again as .doc remove the hidden information? This would be a solution easily available without having to use the rhdtool.exe.
  • Anonymous
    April 30, 2004
    No, the RTF route doesn't seem to get you any benefit. For the five files above, saving the original as .rtf and then reloading the .rtf and saving again as .doc only trimmed 10-30 kB per file.
  • Anonymous
    September 11, 2006
    hey,

    Can i find out what all data has been actually removed from the word document ? Or basically can i generate a snapshot of my previous work ?  
  • Anonymous
    September 14, 2006
    is it working ?
  • Anonymous
    September 17, 2006
    Novice - I don't think Word can do exactly what you want. But try the "Track Changes" feature, which lets you view deletions.