How can I make Word cope with a 600+ page book?

[AuthorinTexas]

I'm writing a text book using Word. It currently has over 600 pages. It
has subdocuments, but I need to work with the master document and subdocs
expanded to be able to generate cross references. But this has bogged down
my machine to the point that I have to wait a noticeable amount of time to
see the cursor move when I enter characters. More for other things. I've
been told I don't need more memory and I have enough swap space. What else
can I do? I can hear the disk spinning almost constantly.

 

[macropod]

Hi AuthorinTexas,

Unless you want to lose all your work, forever, it's probably not a good
idea to use the Master Document feature. See:
http://word.mvps.org/faqs/general/WhyMasterDocsCorrupt.htm

You'll find you can achieve pretty much the same intended result by using
INCLUDETEXT fields to link contents, and possibly RD fields for TOC
purposes.

If your documents use STYELREF fields and/or have lots of pictures etc
embedded, this too will slow them down.

For maximum speed, you could work in 'Normal' view with background
repagination turned off.

Cheers