Mail Merge Speed Issues!!

[Adam Rolwey]

I am using word 2000 on a P-3 800 with 256 megs of RAM and
WIN 2k sp4. I do mail merges a lot and my problem is i
merge 1000 records at a time and around 500 it slows to a
crawl. it takes 2-3 seconds to merge one record. the
source is a dbf file. approx 33k names. we have had the
printer inspected and upgraded, it is a hitachi ddp70.
the printer is directly connected to the computer via the
parallel port. the printer stops and says waiting for
data. we know it is word that is the issue. the CPU
spikes to 100%. I have shut off all auto features.
applied all updates to word, and i am still having this
issue.

we originally had a 333 with 128 ram and figured this was
the issue so we replaced it with an 800. I have had as
much as 512 megs of ram in this machine and it makes no
difference.

ideally i would like to be able to send 4-5k records at a
time to the printer and have it go straight through. the
printer will print 70 pages a minute but with word being
so slow we are losing a lot of time.

i hope someone has suggestions for this issue!!!

 

[John Grierson]

Hi Adam,

I used to have this problem with a single page document
that contained a lot of graphics + upwards of 60
MergeFields. Getting about 1,000 pages could take 20 mins!

Guessing that you are merging to printer and that your
main concern is not tying up valuable printer time?

So try merging to document - that will still take a long
time but you can then send that document to the printer.

But to speed the whole thing up merge to document in small
batches (using different file names, Doc1 Doc2 etc) and
then concatenate the resultant files into one for sending
to printer.

Be interested to learn if this helps.

John
------Original Message-----

 

[Guest]

the problem is not tying up the printer as much as word
slowing to a crawl. even merging to a file word is so
slow. it seems to be a memory leak i think. does anyone
have any more ideas?