Word – Tabbed browsing of documents in Microsoft Word

Most of these will only help with existing documents, but saving as the Word 2007 DOCX format will help with new documents.

Word 2007

Compress Images

1. Click on an image
2. Go to the Picture Tools "Format" ribbon
3. Click "Compress Pictures"

There are then various options for deleting cropped areas, lowering the resolution etc.

Save as DOCX

The new DOCX format is much smaller as it's basically a ZIP file wrapper. Try renaming a .docx file to .zip to look inside if you're curious.

Remove Hidden Data

See this article from Microsoft Remove hidden data and personal information from Office documents

Word 2003

Compress Images

1. Right-click on an image
2. Click "Show Picture Toolbar"
3. Click "Compress Pictures"

Remove Hidden Data

Download the Office 2003/XP Add-in: Remove Hidden Data - "With this add-in you can permanently remove hidden data and collaboration data, such as change tracking and comments, from Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint files."

VMWare ThinApp is what you are seeing. I've done some testing while it was still called Thinstall and then VMware bought it. It's nice because it allows you to use Office 2003 / Office 2007 / Office 2010 and many more applications like IE6, IE7, IE8 next to each other.

Basically procedure to create it looks like this:

1. You install yourself a clean system. (VM machine is perfect for this)
2. You run Thinapp do to a system snapshot. Then you install application
3. You run Thinapp again and it finds the changes with last snapshot and packs it up.

This even gets better. You can install NET, Java after the first snapshot and then application that uses NET or Java. And then use the application created with ThinApp on system that doesn't have NET or Java Installed.

Just to add the size difference is because Excel will use Word packed files. If you move away Word application Excel won't work.