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Word 2K and large documents

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by wyldwezl

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Friend of mine is writing his dissertation and has been having trouble with the document crashing his computer. We both thought it had to do with his 98SE install, so he popped for XP and a clean install. That went well enough, but the trouble hasreappeared. Here are some details:

"The file is 755kb, by far the biggest I have. It loads up just fine. It's when I'm in the middle of the document and I'm inserting things that the problem happens. It doesn't always happen, but it happens sooner or later--within 15 minutes. Anyway, I don't have a problem until I start altering text in the middle of this huge file, thus making the whole thing alter margins and lengthen. That's the trigger. After the first time I tried it again to seeif I could read the details of the fault. That's when it restarted."

He's asked M$ to help, but they want $$, a lot of it. I've never crashed a Word doc., but then I'm using 97. And haven't written a dissertation.

He has a fairly current machine with a good fast hard drive, a fast processor, 256 MB of memory, and basic AGP video card (an older ATI Xpert of some sort). We don't believe it's a hardware problem.

He has NOT applied the service packs, which was my first advice to him. He said that his connection to M$ hung while trying to do the autoinstall. My suggestion was just to download the whole exe file and apply it.

I'm open for suggestions and will continue my research.

Wyldwezl

4 replies

by dklippert

One of the first things to do is to rename/delete Normal.dot.
Delete any shards of temp files left by Word. They start with a tilde(~). You can usually delete ~*.*
Do try to install the service packs.

by dklippert

Word claims 32Mb as the maximum file size.
Here are some sugestions from the forums:

Work primarily in Normal view and switching off automatic pagination. You can use Print layout view when you are nearing the end.

Master document has not improved. Avoid using it.

Avoid direct formatting; use Styles.
Don't use paragraph breaks to create space - use the Space Before option in your styles.

Try to keep a continuous document with no sections.
If you need to change the Header + Footer for each chapter, use StyleRef to add the appropriate Chapter Name to the H or F. Minimise use of tables (as they slow down editing) and avoid automatic numbering: use SEQ fields for
any numbering required. Omit or just link the graphics to keep the file size down until you have finished the textual based editing. If you need to create a ToC, do it from a separate document using the RD field as a ToC will dramatically increase the overhead.

by wyldwezl

Upon further advice, my friend broke the document into individual chapters. Found out that in ch. 1 there was some problem, so he cpoy/pasted it into a fresh document. Works trouble-free now. What I foung out later is that the doc originally started life as a Word 97 document; that may have been part of the problem.

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