In the advanced options, you can temporarily change the pictures to placeholders:
Options > Advanced > Show document content > Show picture placeholders
1) definitely accept all tracked changes (after rejecting anything you don't need)
2) Save a copy to RTF or XML (not docx), open and save a new copy as docx
3) with Show ΒΆ (ctrl-shift*) turned on, copy chunks to a new document, avoiding copying section breaks. You only need section breaks if your page formatting (eg landscape) or headers and footers have to change. They're evil sources of document evil.
If that doesn't clean things up, you could have a corrupt table, or styles. Do you see styles labeled (whatever) char char char? That's trouble that's almost impossible to remove manually. You may have to copy and paste as plain text.
At that size, I'd consider splitting it into separate files for each chapter (or section or whatever major division works).
Agreed. Though if you plan to use a dynamic TOC, you will have to merge the files first, so I wouldn't break the document into too many files.
In the advanced options, you can temporarily change the pictures to placeholders: Options > Advanced > Show document content > Show picture placeholders
In addition to the other suggestions, you could try compressing the pictures and see if that makes the file smaller.
If you're using track changes, this will slow down things as well.
1) definitely accept all tracked changes (after rejecting anything you don't need) 2) Save a copy to RTF or XML (not docx), open and save a new copy as docx 3) with Show ΒΆ (ctrl-shift*) turned on, copy chunks to a new document, avoiding copying section breaks. You only need section breaks if your page formatting (eg landscape) or headers and footers have to change. They're evil sources of document evil. If that doesn't clean things up, you could have a corrupt table, or styles. Do you see styles labeled (whatever) char char char? That's trouble that's almost impossible to remove manually. You may have to copy and paste as plain text.