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I remember the days when MacWrite fit on an 800K floppy and ran in less than 2MB of RAM (and that's with the OS also running in that same RAM).

So MacWrite would have been taking about 50% of available RAM (maybe 4 MB back then).

Meanwhile, in the year 2022, that 330MB of RAM Pages takes up would tally up to ~8% of the RAM even on a Mac with only 4GB installed. So, resource usage has actually dropped a great deal, even as swapping to SSD has gotten exponentially faster.

You might as well be talking about running a Model T on a dirt road next to a Tesla on an interstate highway. The Model T is gasping to hit 35 mph, while the Tesla is barely breaking a sweat at 80.

Like I said before, modern Macs are fast enough and juggle memory so well that the footprint of opening Pages should not be some huge issue. I get wanting to not run bloatware, but if you find yourself griping about running a word processing program on your Mac, you might need to consider a new machine.
 
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Though I'm pretty much on board with the various suggestions of just go with Pages or similar, another mildly klunky option is to print it to PDF and view that. From the sound of things, the docx is being downloaded, so put it into a friendlier format and use it.

Or Save As to doc, Pages and view that.

No sense, imo, to keep it in a format that is "unusable".

EDIT: oops! What @bogdanw said.
 
Hi all,

I have to read Word documents frequently in college, and I suspect they won't be disappearing when I graduate. MacOS does an excellent job at opening most file types with Preview, to the point where I actually think it's the best part of the OS. Unfortunately, it can't handle the docx format, so I have to end up either using the spacebar preview, or opening things in Pages. The problem is, Pages isn't exactly a light program. I don't want multiple instances of it using up system resources when I just want to view the content, not edit it. It boggles my mind that Microsoft doesn't have a solution to this yet; it's as if Photoshop didn't standardize PNGs and instead encouraged everyone to have Photoshop on their machines to view psd files. Though I suppose this isn't entirely Microsoft's fault; people just choose not to export their finished works as PDFs.

So, does anyone have any suggestion for a 3rd party application that lets me view these files without hogging memory?

Thanks.
Doc Opener is a fast, free app that lets you read, print, and edit Doc files created by Microsoft Word and other office applications. It also includes a built-in PDF viewer for quick printing and sharing of PDF files. This lightweight app is built for speed - it opens your docs quickly and gets out of your way.
 
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