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USENIX Technical Program - Abstract - WinsSys - August 2000
Opportunities for Bandwidth Adaptation in Microsoft Office Documents
Eyal de Lara, Dan S. Wallach, Willy Zwaenepoel, Rice University
Abstract
Microsoft Office, the most popular office productivity suite, produces
large documents that can result in long download latencies for
platforms with limited bandwidth. To reduce latency and improve the
user's experience, these documents need to be adapted for transmission
on a limited-bandwidth network.
To identify opportunities for adaptation, we characterize
documents created by three popular applications
from the Microsoft Office suite: Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. Our
study encompasses over 12,500 documents retrieved from 935 different
Web sites.
Our main conclusions are: 1) Microsoft Office documents are large and
require adaptation on bandwidth-limited clients; 2) embedded objects
and images account for the majority of the data in these documents,
with image types being the most popular non-text content, suggesting
that adaptation efforts should focus on these elements; 3) compression
considerably reduces the size of these documents; and 4) the internal
structure of these documents (pages, slides, or sheets) can be used to
download elements on demand and reduce user-perceived latency.
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