How Many Pages are in a Gigabyte? Megabyte?

As with so many interesting questions regarding sizes, capacities and loads, the answer is: it depends. An interesting analogy might be the following question: How many people are on the freeway? An answer would require further information. Which freeway? How long is the stretch of road? What is the time of day? How many people are in each vehicle?

There are a number of factors contributing to the analysis of how many pages are in a gigabyte. Different document types will generate very different numbers of pages per document and per gigabyte. For example, an expanded email file from Microsoft Outlook (a .pst file) could generate a relatively small number of pages (one each for every email, for instance), so the end result would be a low page count for the relatively large amount of disk space that the file originally consumed (because the .pst file has mailbox or other system data that takes up file space but does not translate to readable information). On the other hand, a Microsoft Excel file may take up a relatively small amount of file space, but generally converts to a disproportionately large number of pages.

 

Different document types generate different numbers of pages per document and per gigabyte. One thing that does hold true is this: for a given document type, the average number of pages produced as compared to the size consumed by the original documents stays consistent. This table summarizes this for some common document types. So, if a client has a good understanding of the mix of the file types in the data they want processed, it is possible to provide estimates of the numbers of resulting pages.