Word documents can, theoretically, get very, very big but there are practical limits that will hit before that. We’ll explain both the possible and realistic limits of Microsoft Word. Also how a PDF page can be larger than a Word page and even bigger than some countries!
All this applies to Word 2007 and later for Windows and Mac using the “Office 2007-…,“ file formats (e.g .docx .dotm etc).
Page Limit
There’s no fixed page limit, a document can have tens of thousands of pages.
Document file size
Word .docx etc. files can’t be more than 512MB (that’s half a gigabyte) and within that no more than 32MB of text. Those are compressed (ZIP) file sizes and 32MB of compressed text is a LOT of text.
In other words, a text only Word document can get up to 32MB but can grow up to a theoretical 512MB when graphics are added.
For comparison, Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” is a famously large book at 565,000 words. In Microsoft Word, it becomes about 1,800 pages in a 1.2MB .docx file. Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” amounts to 5,300+ pages, 1.4 million words but even that massive six volume work is just under 4MB in a Word docx file.
Page/Paper Size
A single Word page can be up to 22” x 22” (55.88cm x 55.88cm).
In practical terms, that means Word can handle metric page sizes up to A3 (11.7 x 16.5 inches or 29.7 x 42 cm) but not the larger A2 (16.5 x 23.4 inches 42cm x 59.4 cm), A1 or A0 pages.
PDF pages can be huge, really massive!
PDF has a huge theoretical page size of 236.7 sq miles or 381km2 (Source German Wikipedia and this discussion of the details) in Adobe Acrobat v7 and later. That’s bigger than some countries or US states and two Australian states.
Full list of Word limits
Here’s the full list of limits to a Word 2007 and later documents. As you can see, aside from paper size, the other limits are more than generous.
| Operating parameter | Limit |
| Maximum number of bookmarks | 2,147,483,647 |
| (Style Definition) maximum number of styles | 4,079 |
| Maximum number of lists | 2,047 |
| Maximum number of comments | 2,147,483,647 |
| Maximum number of fields | 2,147,483,647 |
| Number of subdocuments in a master document | 255 |
| Maximum number of moves | 2,147,483,647 |
| (Range Permission) maximum number allowed | 2,147,483,647 |
| Size of file Word can open | 512 MB |
| Maximum number of records to display in recipients list dialog | 10,000 |
| Maximum paper size | 22″ x 22″ 55.88cm x 55.88cm |
But in the Real Word™ …
Those are the theoretical limits to Microsoft Word, the real limits are much lower but much harder to define.
When a document gets really big, Word can have trouble handling it or might not be able to cope at all. The x factors are the CPU power, disk speed and especially available memory. Word needs enough resources to decompress the document file and store it in memory (real or paged).
If you’ve ever opened up a large document with many images, you’ve probably noticed that Word slows down and scrolling is sluggish. That means you’re reaching the practical limits of Word on your computer. Our huge test document of “In Search of Lost Time” (see above) worked but was very slow to manage even on a powerful computer with plenty of memory.
One workaround is to split the large document into smaller docs which can be merged with Master Documents into a single document when needed. But Master Documents has its own troubles.
In short …
Modern Word (at least Word 2007 and later) can handle very large documents, depending more on the computer power than the huge limits built into the Word document format.
If you regularly work with large documents, do it on a powerful computer with lots of memory, good CPU and fast graphics card.
Note: there are many misinterpretations of these details floating around the Internet with misinformation copied from one page to another. For example, it’s much quoted that the 32MB limit includes graphics but the Microsoft documentation (as opposed to forums) clearly says it’s a text only threshold.
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