Pages 09 document files are 4 x the size of the same doc saved in Word?

Question

I noticed that if I save a document in Pages 09 native format, it is about 4 times the size as the same document saved as a Word document. None of the documents that I'm working on have graphics, fancy backgrounds or mixed fonts. They are simple one page business letters.
Any thoughts on this a greatly appreciated.
Bud James

Answer 1

I have had concerns about this very same issue. I noticed that a 1 page document of plain text in Pages 09 took up 128KB of space, whereas if I saved the same document to Word 2004 it was 24KB. However it is in fact true that the larger the document the more efficient it is. A 2 page text document in Pages 09 was 168KB. If I add my 1 page document to the end of my 2 page document, the total size of the new document in Pages 09 is 200KB.
Here's the kicker: I had a 32-page Word 2004 document (plain text) that occupied 220KB of disk space. When I opened it in Pages and saved it as a Pages 09 doc, it was 160KB, which obviously is smaller than the Word doc, but also is smaller than the 2 page document I created with Pages 09! Obviously Pages is more efficient than Word with large documents, but a lot less efficient with small documents.
The problem is, many of us write a lot of small documents-- notes, letters, etc. I am concerned that my laptop's hard disk space (only 120 GB total) will get used up a lot quicker with Pages than with Word. This makes me very reluctant to use Pages on a regular basis.
(I can anticipate the response: Get a big hard drive and quit complaining! But still...).