Why has my journal file quadrupled in size?

LibreOffice is so slow as to be unusable. My Journal as gone from a little over 1000 pages to 4000+. I think this may be the reason it is so slow

  • Which version of the LO are you using?
  • … and what operating system?
  • What file type are you using?

Can you upload or share a sample file here?

My Journal as gone from a little over 1000 pages to 4000+

How do you fill that Journal (a phrase which isn’t specified at all)? Pages in Writer are added on demand based on content of the document, hence something/somebody must have added content to the file. LibreOffice doesn’t add content on its own.


The whole thing sounds a bit like you are opening some text file, automatically generated by some process on your system and (mis-)using LibreOffice as a pure text editor / text viewer.

Margins or indents set to values near to page width values?

I just upgraded to LO 6.4 which is when the trouble started. I am using Win 10. My Journal is simply a Writer file to which I write a paragraph or so about what has gone on in my day and have been doing this since 2008. It was a little over 1000 pages. It appears to me that what I have written has copied 3 times and I don’t know how to correct it. I have started a new My Journal file, posting the past two days events and the speed is normal. Now I am puzzling over how to get one copy of my past 12 years writing into my new file and it seems overwhelming.

Without the specific sample file we can guessing only. I never created a 1000+ page document. Even the Andrew Pitonyak’s huge macro books contain about 600+ pages “only”. And (maybe) the behavior depends on the content and the applied structure, and the type of the file…

Are you using the native, International standard ODF file types?

@barbarag, Before testing, make a copy of the document.

Go to the end of the document (Ctrl+End) and copy part of the last paragraph you wrote (ideally the date). Search for this text in the document (Ctrl+H), and compare if the next paragraph is a copy of the first paragraph, and if it is beyond page 1000. Ideally you could delete from this point to the end of the document.

By the way, once solved the quadruplicated data, it could be handy to split the document in sections (5 or 10 years each).

And don’t share here your document. Nobody wants you to post your journal notes here.


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Thank you Leroy6. I think I can make your suggestion work. I probably should have explained that I am 86 years old and not the sharpest knife in the drawer, I am going to check this as solved even though I will be working on this very slowly, double checking myself at every step. If and when I get things back together, I certainly will follow your suggestion to split the file. Again, I am so grateful