how to open this WORD file

[Dave Davison]

Bit of a hurdle.....somehow the system allowed me to create a rather large Word doc but it will not allow me to open it. Any ideas if this hurdle can be overcome. Dave.

[HansV]

How on earth did you manage to create such a large document?

According to the official documentation (Operating parameter limitations and specifications in Word), the maximum size of files that Word can open is 512 megabytes, so if your document is larger, you cannot open it with Word.

You might try WordPad (included with Windows), or perhaps the Writer application in LibreOffice, but I have no idea whether that will work.

[Dave Davison]

A thousand thanks Hans, at the first attempt Word Pad did open it after an extended period of time but I thankfully retrieved the information I wanted. How it happened was, whilst compiling a list of all the track titles on a couple of CD's, in order to save time I simply opened each Cd and took a screen shot of the files listed then copied it into a Word doc. Why it saved such a massive file I don't know seeing it exceeded the 512 MB maximum. Anyway, all's well that ends well, your advice saved the day. Dave.

[Rudi]

... a couple of CD's ...

...a couple? Sounds more like several racks!

Glad you came right Dave!

[macropod]

Here's another approach that allows you to reatin all your document's formatting:
1. Change the extension to .zip.
2. Opening the zip archive (e.g. with WinZip).
3. Extract & delete sufficient of the embedded objects to reduce the file size below 512Mb.
4. Restore the original extension.
5. Open the document and reinsert the objects, allowing Word to compress all objects in the file. If that doesn’t result in a document with less than 512MB, you will need to extract them individually, reduce their size, then reinsert them. If that doesn’t work, split the document…
You can also re-size and reinsert the embedded objects to reduce the file size below 512Mb. This will necessitate processing more such objects than a simple extraction & deletion, but should avoid the need to do much the same from within Word afterwards.

[Dave Davison]

Thanks Paul for the laternative route. What bamboozles me is I can copy e.g. four photos into a Word doc and it only reads 285 KB whereas pasting two screen shots gave the result that prompted me to ask the question. Cheers Dave.

[HansV]

It seems unlikely that 2 screenshots would result in a file of more than 512 MB. A typical screenshot shouldn't be larger than a megabyte or so.

[Dave Davison]

...........so the cause will remain a mystery forever but it will never happen again...Cheers Dave.