Mac Word files are too big

[Gonzosan]

Hey all, I'm trying to upload a book to smashwords and I noticed I needed to get it down to under 5MB. I tried to compress the images down using mac, which is apparently not a feature so I had to do it at work using Word 2007. I was able to compress the images and get it down to 1.3MB which was perfect. I opened it up in Mac Word 2011 and it had a few things on it that needed to be adjusted (just a few titles weren't centered). After I saved it in both docx it seemed fine, but when I save it in doc it shoots up to 21MB each time. I tried copying it all and using a new document, still same size. I manually re-sized each image and reinserted them which brought it down a bit but not nearly enough. I made sure it wasn't auto saving, and it wasn't keeping track of changes. What am I doing wrong here? I'm started to think Mac Word is fairly useless as 99% of this book was completed at work on Windows. I'm more than likely going to just upload the book from work, but it's frustrating that I can't use my own computer to do it. Any help? On that note, if anyone knows a way to make a Table of Contents that actually links I would appreciate it as well. Apparently this feature doesn't exist in Mac from what I've read although nothing concrete stating this. Thanks

*Edit* and just to be clear, this cannot be zipped/rar'd since the file itself needs to be under 5MB. It was done with Windows, so I just need to know how it can be done using Mac. I have a 2011 Macbook pro

 

[Gonzosan]

Anything? I looked up some other programs that I could use in the future to create ebooks. I have inDesign which I'd really like to use for books, but I'm not sure how good it would be for typical ebooks that don't have a lot of graphical elements. I looked up Pages, but seems like it's on par with Word. Only reason I would like to use word is because a few distributors seem to favor Word doc's. For now I'm going to be uploading my current book via Windows since I just want to upload this to smashwords and it seems like Mac Word seems to make this as painful as possible. I appreciate the info.

 

[Gonzosan]

Well I figure I'll post what I found out since no one replied. It might be obvious to others who use Word a lot, but I had to find out over a few days of pulling my hair out. The issue isn't with a specific version of Word but how .doc files save images. I had like 10-12 images in my book, they were all resized as JPEGs and I made sure the entire folder containing the images was only 2MB total. When I used them in Word I would apply a drop shadow, nothing crazy, just enough to make the image pop out slightly so it doesn't blend into the pages. Apparently when Word saves these images, it turns them into PNG files with the transparency of the drop shadow into one bigger image. So it effectively double if not triples the size of the image itself. Needless to say Word isn't very efficient at this stuff so it naturally bloats up the file like crazy. After I removed all the effects my file size dropped to 833KB down from 16MB. I was pretty thrilled to find this out, even though it's probably obvious now. From now on I'll make all my changes to the images in Photoshop and just insert them with no additional effects provided in Word.

As far as the TOC issue, I think I can work around that with Bookmarks and linking them myself which is fine. It's actually something Smashwords requires, which is a little frustrating, but also great to know that Mac Word can provide everything I need to write ebooks. Hope this helps others who may come across this issue.