I got a .doc file off someone and when I opened it I was asked if it was ok to use a convertor (which looked ok so I said yeah). It was only later that I noticed the size of the file was really big. It was 700kb and when I copied and pasted the text into a blank word file the new file was only 23kb in size.
Why would it be so big? I've heard viruses can come with .doc files but I scanned it and it seems ok. The person I got it off is cool too.
I just want to know why it would be over 10 times bigger than the sum of its parts.
Thanks for any advice :-)

Quite possibly the original .doc file had images imbedded into it.

The conversion probably stripped the images out, therefore a much smaller file.

I create a lot of instruction manuals, 10 pages can easily be 3000k, without the images 30.

If you are really concerned about it, right click on the file and tell your AV to scan it. Though I doubt it will find anything.

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Those images could have been tiff files. And if so, the file would have been VERY large. Also, you stated that the file went through a converter. Depending on the orginal file type, there could have been lots of imbedded control characters, etc which may have added to the file size.

Thanks for your help guys :-)
I think it was probably the embedded characters you mentioned.