Recently I noticed something strange in the current Mac version of Apple’s Pages (version 5.2 1860). If you create a new blank document and immediately save the file in Pages own format you get a 62 KB file, but if you export it in “.docx” format you get a 493 KB file, almost 8 times bigger. And if you export it in “.doc (Word 1997-2004 compatible)” format, you get a huge 1.5 MB file that’s 24 times bigger.
So what is it putting in these files? Given that .docx formatted documents are basically zip files with a different extension it’s quite easy to see what is inside them. Simply append .zip to the filename and double-click on the file to have your Mac open the file with the default zip file handler Archive Utility. And you’ll find these files in the extracted folder…