Benefits and Disadvantages of Compressing a theWord Module discusses the pros and the cons of compressing a module.
You can open modules properties, and on the second tab at the top, open that tab and change the module to be compressed. But what are the benefits and disadvantages of doing this? Note that there are both involved.
While the majority of theWord user should just ignore this altogether, there are some things to take note of. The program can encode or compress its data and work with it decompressing it on the fly. There should be a minor CPU hit for doing this, but with the CPUs and computers most people have today, it is minimum or not even detectable.
Disadvantages
The one big disadvantage of compressing theWord module is if you want to make a mysword module from it. In this case, the conversion will always fail. You need to open the module in theWord and uncompress it to get around this. If the module is encrypted, you cannot change the compression, but encrypted modules don’t convert anyway.
Another disadvantage is the amount of space your files will occupy on your hard disk. One factor here is if your literally have 10s of thousands of files and you have a small hard disk, this can become a problem.
But again today, your typical computer has terabytes of space, so this isn’t a problem.
But theWord has a portable mode that can be installed on a USB drive, so a 8 GB drive that isn’t much useful for other things can be very hand used in this way. I do this extensively but use the USB install mode and make folders on external drives, and copy all of a particular topic into that study work desk. For example, all your files on the Holy Spirit.
If that is a problem, then go into each module and compress the module. You should pick 20 or 30 of your largest modules and try it and see how much gain you will get. If the module is also prepped for distribution, your space gain might be very little and not worth the effort.
Advantages
In considering both sides of the story here, it is better to always have your library as compact as possible. So that is the big advantage.
My Policy
As far as the modules that I distribute, I try to prepare for distribution on each module before uploading it. I have about 6,000 theWord modules in English, and many of them are ones I found created by other people. So the compressing and preparing is spotty sometimes.
I have decided to just go with two policies.
1. I am uploading only unencrypted modules unless I cannot find an unencrypted one.
2. I am compressing all modules I upload.
On the second point, I have space restrictions on my websites, and I regularly down, and burn a copy of my websites about every 2 to 3 months. So I can get all of my websites on a single 25 GB BluRay disc, which costs about $10 dollars each, so they add up. Compression is a need in my case.
Benefits and Disadvantages of Compressing a theWord Module