I attended an R2 Launch event yesterday. It was at the Microsoft office in Farmington, CT, and hosted by Adam Jorgensen (blog) of Pragmatic Works. Adam did a great job in walking us through all of the new features of R2. In particular we spent a good amount of time on PowerPivot. When I asked Adam about issues with disk space for users who save their PowerPivot files locally he indicated that he has not come across any disk space issues. I don’t think he has seen anyone trying to grab 30GB of data (yet), but he did say that the compression has worked well so far.
Of all the things I learned today, one of the neatest things was the fact that you could simply rename an Office 2007 document as a ZIP file and open the file with WinZip to examine the contents. Adam mentioned how he was having trouble understanding why a particular PowerPivot report was fairly large. When he renamed it is a .zip file he was able to quickly isolate the issue. Go ahead and try it with a .docx or .xlsx file, just rename to a .zip file, open, and explore.
I had not heard about this previously. A quick Google Bing for the topic came back with a few hits that had to do with IE and Office downloads but that was about it. Not sure if this will ever be useful for anyone or not, but I certainly found it interesting enough and felt it was worth mentioning here.
‘Cause you’re down like that. Word to your DB.
With 7zip you can open the archive without renaming. This is useful for getting images and other assets out of word documents.