Long delays in Insert Cross Reference dialog

[matt_google]

When I use the Insert Cross Reference for a Numbered Item it can take
the dialog up to 20 seconds to respond. The dialog opens, but any
attempts to scroll down the list of numbered items (either with
keyboard or scroll bar) results in the list just jumping back to the
top. After the initial period things work fine - scrolling and
selection is as expected.

This is with a 30 page document of which around 90% of lines are
numbered lines so it is a limit case. However in the Word XP on
windows the response is immediate.

Is anybody else seeing this problem ?

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Everyone sees that problem It's a design limitation of Word that hits
users of Word for Mac.

With a little 30-page document, the problem is quite survivable. On a
500-page document, you can wait several minutes for each insertion

We developed some macros that "reduce" the problem by enabling you to place
all of your cross references together at the end of the document, then drag
them into place in the text once created. This dramatically speeds up the
inserting of cross-references on long documents. But it's not worth the
fiddling for a document of that size.

On the PC, by the way, the problem still exists (Windows Word and Mac Word
are running the same code...). It's a mechanism that was designed a while
ago for "economy" rather than "performance". Your average PC is now a great
deal more powerful than the ones this was designed for, so on the PC you
don't notice the problem until documents get above 2,000 pages. It's just
that on the PC, Word can help itself to more CPU and memory and so solves
the user's problem by brute force. On the Mac, Word can't gobble that much
power so we have to wait...

Hope this helps

On 13/9/05 3:35 PM, in article
(e-mail address removed),

When I use the Insert Cross Reference for a Numbered Item it can take
the dialog up to 20 seconds to respond. The dialog opens, but any
attempts to scroll down the list of numbered items (either with
keyboard or scroll bar) results in the list just jumping back to the
top. After the initial period things work fine - scrolling and
selection is as expected.

This is with a 30 page document of which around 90% of lines are
numbered lines so it is a limit case. However in the Word XP on
windows the response is immediate.

Is anybody else seeing this problem ?

--

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me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410