Office: Office and Setup Use More Disk Space Than Expected

The information in this article applies to:

• Microsoft Office for Windows 95, version 7.0
• Microsoft Office 97 for Windows

SYMPTOMS

When you install Microsoft Office, the amount of disk space that the Setup program requests may be different from the amount that is documented on the Microsoft Office package, and different from the amount the application actually uses.

CAUSE

This behavior occurs for a number of reasons. The following are causes for Microsoft Office or the Microsoft Office Setup program to use more disk space than expected:

GID Files

The Office Setup program installs one .gid file for each Help file that is installed. The .gid file is a 0-byte file that increases in size when you run Help for the first time and set up the Help file. The size of the .gid file may increase to as much as one-third the size of the Help file itself.

NOTE: In Microsoft Office 97, .gid files are not copied to your computer by the Setup program. However, when you run Help for the first time, a .gid file will be created for each Help file you open.

FTS Files

When you run Help, if you click the Index button, the Help file is indexed, and a Full Text Search (.fts) file is created. This file may be larger than the Help file itself.

Windows Swap File

The Microsoft Windows swap file grows considerably during Office Setup, as well as during regular use of Microsoft Windows. This means that you will actually need more disk space than the documented requirements to run Microsoft Office and the Setup program. However, this is by design of Microsoft Windows, and this behavior affects all of the applications that you run under Windows, not just Microsoft Office.

The size of the swap file depends on the amount of available memory on your computer. In general, the size of your swap file plus the amount of available memory on your computer equal approximately 18 megabytes (MB). Note that the minimum memory required in Windows is 14 MB.

This also means that if you check the amount of free disk space before and after running Office Setup, the difference between these two values will be greater than the amount of disk space required for the Office installation option that you chose.

Registry

The size of the registry file in Windows (the hidden files User.dat and System.dat) may also grow considerably after using Microsoft Office.

Setup from Administrative Install

When you run Setup from an administrative installation of Microsoft Office 7.0 on a network server, the disk space used for the files copied to the Common Files folder may vary from 2.5 MB (Compact) to 5.4 MB (Typical) to 18.6 MB (Custom w/Select All or Workstation with shared applications installed to local hard disk).

MORE INFORMATION

For additional information, please see the following article(s) in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

   ARTICLE-ID: Q131173
   TITLE     : OFF7: Minimum System Requirements for Running Office 7.0

   ARTICLE-ID: Q134740
   TITLE     : OFF7: Disk Space Required For Different Install Options