Why are Numbers, Pages, and related documents so large by comparison?

[Mork]

I've noticed that taking a spreadsheet, word document, or similar from, say LIbreOffice, and moving that content to Numbers or Pages, the file size increases by a factor of about 20 times!

For example, a simple word document takes about 20K, but that same document in pages is often around 600K.

Just wondering why the apple office equivalents take so much more space to store documents and if there's any "workaround".

Thanks,

 

[Ritsuka]

Because a Pages document includes a high resolution preview image.

 

[Mork]

I don't need that, but that answers the question about Pages.

Does Numbers have similar (unneeded, in my case) high-res previews gobbling up 20 times the disk space?

Appreciate your reply.

 

[m.x]

I would also like to have some insight why Numbers and Pages feel so “bloated“...

Michael Tsai wrote in his blog:

To check out Apple’s performance claims, I tried opening a 34 MB CSV file. Numbers 10.0 took 47 seconds and used 2.18 GB of private memory. Microsoft Excel 16.36 took 5 seconds and used 220 MB of private memory.

So Numbers took 9.4 times as long as Excel, which isn’t great. But it’s an improvement over my test of Numbers ’13 and Excel 2011, where Numbers took 102 times as long as Excel.

 

[Bazza1]

It should make sense to use Apple's iWork suite rather than buy (or, more correctly, subscribe) into the whole Office realm, but really, iWork's incompatibility with 'real' work (including the size issues noted above) or even getting documents to be compatible between Apple OS platforms makes it a non-starter. It's like a bloatware version of the old Microsoft Works. Home hobbyist stuff.

 

[Ritsuka]

Yes, Numbers documents store a preview image too.

 

[KALLT]

Bear in mind that the iWork formats are not similar to the Office formats (there is a difference between the doc/xsl and docx/xslx formats too). Apple likely made different decisions in the design of their formats that have resulted in larger files, the latter which may not have been a concern to Apple. Preview images for Finder are certainly one thing, other things are embedded document styles/themes even if not (yet) used in the saved document and metadata that iWork or macOS/iOS use.

Another thing to consider is that the import capabilities of the iWork apps are likely not ideal; depending on the differences between the formats (even doc/xsl and docx/xslx differ a lot that way) Apple has to translate one format into another; which may add bloat where the original format did not have it.

It should make sense to use Apple's iWork suite rather than buy (or, more correctly, subscribe) into the whole Office realm, but really, iWork's incompatibility with 'real' work (including the size issues noted above) or even getting documents to be compatible between Apple OS platforms makes it a non-starter. It's like a bloatware version of the old Microsoft Works. Home hobbyist stuff.

Home users have likely always been the target of iWork. Cross-compatibility with the predominant formats (doc and xsl) has been way worse in the past.