long document with lots of tables

[Barbara White]

We're using Word 2000 on Windows 2000 to convert a set of
"information-mapped" documents into one file. The original documents
span ~600 pages.

We are about 1/10 of the way into the conversion. The file is already
155 pages and is .93MB. (So it would seem that size-wise, we have a way
to go before we reach the [magic] 32MB limit.) We're probably going to
wind up having thousands of tables in this document to achieve the
info-mapped design. However, I remember hearing that having lots of
tables in a Word document can be a bad thing.

Will this (the large number of tables) coupled with the eventual size of
the document likely cause problems down the road? (I know that with
tools like Word and FrameMaker, there are certain things and
combinations of things to avoid problems in the end. I'm wondering if
this is one of them. I seem to remember that it was. That information
could be dated, though.)

Thanks for any help.

Barbara

 

[macropod]

Hi Barbara,

One way around the inevitable file size/performance problem (not to mention
minimising potential corruption problems) would be to keep the parts of the
document in different files and, if they need to be printed as a single
document (there are ways of avoiding this) create another document that
links them together via INCLUDETEXT fields. If you only need them to share a
common Table of Contents, then you could instead create another document
that links to their headings for TOC generation via RD fields.

Cheers

We're using Word 2000 on Windows 2000 to convert a set of
"information-mapped" documents into one file. The original documents
span ~600 pages.

We are about 1/10 of the way into the conversion. The file is already
155 pages and is .93MB. (So it would seem that size-wise, we have a way
to go before we reach the [magic] 32MB limit.) We're probably going to
wind up having thousands of tables in this document to achieve the
info-mapped design. However, I remember hearing that having lots of
tables in a Word document can be a bad thing.

Will this (the large number of tables) coupled with the eventual size of
the document likely cause problems down the road? (I know that with
tools like Word and FrameMaker, there are certain things and
combinations of things to avoid problems in the end. I'm wondering if
this is one of them. I seem to remember that it was. That information
could be dated, though.)

Thanks for any help.

Barbara