Trim the Office Applications

Microsoft Office's strength in the marketplace is as mighty as its desire to waste space on your hard drive. It's time you took back what belongs to you.

Cut Out Some Elements
Typical savings: Several to dozens of megabytes

If you find you're not using some Office elements often, such as wizards, templates, or help files, you can remove them by using Office's setup program. You can even remove entire applications, like PowerPoint, if you never use them.

For Office 2000, select Start, Settings, Control Panel and then double-click Add/Remove Programs option. Find Office 2000 and double-click it. Now select Add or Remove. Click any program's plus sign to list all of its elements. As you click the disk icon beside each element, elect to "Run them From CD," that is, take them off the hard disk.

For Office 97, slip in the installation CD-ROM, and when the Autorun setup screen appears, select the program you want to trim or uninstall completely. You'll see a dialog box with an Add/Remove button. Click this and select elements you want to remove.

Fire the Office Assistant
Typical savings: Hundreds of kilobytes to more than a megabyte

Does anybody like Office Assistant? It is intrusive and can slow things down a lot. Using the technique described in the previous tip, locate the Office Assistant and uninstall it. Under Office 97, this will save you 833KB. Under Office 2000, select "Run all From CD" for this option, and it will save you more than a megabyte.

Filter Tip
Typical savings: Kilobytes (varies)

When you install Office applications, you're also installing a bucket of data converters and filters, many of which you don't need. Outlook fans, what do you want more, 2338KB of drive space or Schedule+ support files? If you've already installed the support files, run the installation program again, and deselect anything under Converters and Filters that looks superfluous. Here are some suggestions: Word's Excel Converter (290KB), Encapsulated PostScript Import (97KB), and Tag Image File Format Import (161KB).

Publish and Be Damned
Typical savings: Varies

A full installation of Microsoft Publisher (a dark horse of the Office family) is death to drive space. There are more than 100MB of tutorials, samples, clip art, and fonts in the Office 97 version. The Office 2000 version is worse. While running the installation, look out for these space-hogging components:

• PaperDirect Templates (Typical savings: 2MB)
• Microsoft Draw and MailMerge (Typical savings: 4MB)
• Clip Art (Typical savings: 27MB of samples) Note: These files can be axed later by deleting .cgm files from the Publisher Clip Art folder.

To save a bundle in disk space, select Graphics Filters, click the Change option, then deselect any file format you'll never want import into Publisher. You can use this technique to get rid of unwanted Text Converters as well.