Hi Guys

I'm new to this forum. I hadn't heard of it before, so thought I'd register. I work for quite a large business, that currently has offshore developers. I work as a consultant, so end up writing functional specifications within MS Word.

However, (and their is always a however) I find that the files end up being horrifically large. The way I write the spec is as follows:

1. Visio Diagram (integrated) with Annotation title
2. Annotation Description

This along with various other textual descriptors of more technical processes. Does anyone have any thoughts on how to reduce overall file size? Would using an integrated diagramming and annotation tool be any better? Or is there a way of uploading all images / diagrams within a document to a local server, that will pull in the appropriate images when viewed?

Any thoughts?

Embedded Visio objects can blow up the size of a document greatly.  I prefer to keep these in separate vsd files and then copy and paste special > Enhanced Metafile.  The metafiles themselves aren't usually too big and they scale much better than lossy graphics (jpg, gif, etc.) so if you need to resize an image it's a lot nicer. 

The drawback is that your graphics are in separate file(s), but I find that I usually use my diagrams for presentations and other materials so it's usually a good idea to only have one master copy of any piece of information.