Normal.dot really big

[Larry]

A couple of years ago, when the Normal.dot in my Word 97 was about 600
KB, I asked how big a Normal.dot was too big, and was told that even
twice that size was no problem. As the number of my macros keeps
increasing, so does the size of Normal--now it's up to 1.42 MB. Plus I
have a global add-in template of about 1 MB. Also, I occasionally run
the Word Code Cleaner. (The tootal number of macros in the two
templates is ... 400).

Is this a problem? Word seems to function normally. The only problem
is that occasionally I'll be working on a document and Word will freeze
up, forcing me to shut it down from the Close Program dialog box.

Larry

 

[Helmut Weber]

Hi Larry,
have been working with Word 97 since 97 (50 Users).
The only period when it became more and more instabile
was when the normal.dot grew to more than 1 MByte.
So I'm keeping it well below that size (800 KB right now)
and am on the safe side, no matter what others may say.
I do not use additional add-ins.
Greetings from Bavaria, Germany
Helmut Weber
"red.sys" & chr$(64) & "t-online.de"

 

[Cindy Meister -WordMVP-]

Hi Larry,

A couple of years ago, when the Normal.dot in my Word 97 was about 600
KB, I asked how big a Normal.dot was too big, and was told that even
twice that size was no problem. As the number of my macros keeps
increasing, so does the size of Normal--now it's up to 1.42 MB. Plus I
have a global add-in template of about 1 MB. Also, I occasionally run
the Word Code Cleaner. (The tootal number of macros in the two
templates is ... 400).

Is this a problem?

As long as it's all still working, no When it could become a
problem... Who knows?

If you want to play it safe, I'd migrate more macros from Normal.dot into
*another* global template. Word can have more than one

and, "of course", back up these templates regularly.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jan 24 2003)
http://www.mvps.org/word

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[Larry]

Hi, Cindy,

I'm glad to hear that the huge size is not necessarily a problem.

Sure, I'd be happy to put all my macros into a global or globals. But,
as I've mentioned before in the Word groups, there is a serious loss of
functionality when one does that.

First, keystrokes assigned to the macros in a global generally do not
display in the Customize Keyboard dialog box. (To compensate for this,
I have keep a document where I manually update the keystrokes assigned
to the macros in the global template.)

Second, macros in a global cannot be directly opened by pressing Edit in
the Macros dialog box. Instead, the user needs to open the global as a
document, then open the VB code window and search for the macros in the
VB code window--the totality of which involves many more steps than
simply opening the Macros dialog box, pressing the first couple of
letters of the macro name, and clicking Edit.

This loss of basic functionality is a real problem, especially
considering the fact that placing macros in a global is the "orthodox,"
recommended approach,

(Also, I of course go regular backups. In fact I have macros that make
copies of Normal and of my main global and place them in a special
folder.)

Larry