Mail Merge vs Performance

[Steve]

Hi,

Presently, I'm testing a mail merge with Windows XP SP1
with all other fixes available and Office XP SP2 with all
other fixes available. The mail merge is between a Word
canvas and another word document for the data. What we
experience is a performance issue. For example, the same
mail merge operation with Win NT and Office 97 took 10
seconds. With the setup Win XP and Office XP, it took
more that 2 minutes. Have you heard anything related to
this issue type ? I'm aware that a possible cause could
be the Office plug-in for Norton but we don't use it.

Thank everyone for any answer.

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Yes, Word XP merge performance can be substantially slower. I don't know
why, but suspect that the main reason is the new feature that allows users
to mark individual records in the data source as being included in or
excluded from the merge. In order to support that, Word has to read the
entire data source and store loads of additional infomation (which you can
see if, for example, you save the Word document as a web page and re-open it
as a text file).