Enormous Size of Some Word Documents

Here is a perplexing one. Our company Sales Assitants use MS Word 97/2000 to do what is called Recaps for Events. These documents end up being very very large due to graphic backgrounds and graphic images on the pages such as company and client logos as well as pictures of events for the particular Event. The finished product is usually printed as well as emailed and sent to the Client, and Local Managers.
The problem is, that our color printers have only 64 meg of Ram Native, and when these docs are printed they can backlog a client machine and the printer for hours especially if multiple copies are printed.

Is there a way to create such a document, without it clogging up email servers and print queues?
I am open to all suggestions.
Thanks