WHEN YOU SAVE a file in Word 2007's default .docx format, you're actually saving a compressed (or zipped) file containing several different XML docu¬ments. This XML format improves on the binary formats found in earlier ver¬sions of Word: Files may be up to 75 percent smaller. In addition, each XML component of a document is segment¬ed into modules whose contents you can manipulate individually.

To uncover the separate components of a .docx file, open Windows Explorer, highlight the file, click FileoRename, change the' .docx' extension to .zip, and press <Enter>. Always keep a copy of the original .docx file on hand, how¬ever, because any alterations you make to the .zip version are permanent.

Now double-click the renamed file to open the "package" in a new folder win¬dow. The screen shot below illustrates the components of a .docx file that has one embedded image. To send someone the document without the image, mere¬ly delete that part of the package with¬out ever opening the file in Word. When you open a .docx file that has been renamed from .zip with one of its com¬ponents (such as an image) deleted, Word may try to "repair" the file, put¬ting a placeholder where the deleted image was, for example. To delete the placeholder, just double-click it.
Similarly, if you want to revise the text, open only the document.xml component and make your changes there. If the file contains comments that you want to remove, strip them out by deleting the comments.xml component. Other elements are styles.xml, which holds the document's style definitions; headers.xml, which has section heads (listed as Header 1, Header 2, and so on); and theme1.xml, which hosts any tem¬plates used to style the document. Note that document.xml.rels has the instruc¬tions for reassembling the components into the complete document, which could include the sources of inserts.