Scrolling is slow and erratic

[Xingjian Zhao]

Hello everyone,

I've been experiencing a problem with Word 2004. Scrolling through different
pages of long documents is extremely erratic and slow. For example, I would
scroll either with my mouse or the scroll bar, but the document would scroll
at an unusually slow speed, and would continue to scroll on its own for
awhile even after I have stopped using the scroll wheel on the mouse or the
scroll bar in the application.

This is a problem that seems to affect Excel as well. When I attempt to
either scroll through a spreadsheet or resize a row or column, the action
(which requires dragging the mouse at some point) would initiate very slowly
on screen so that the speed at which a row or column is resized is much
slower than the speed at which I am dragging my house (visualize an
expanding column slowly "following" the cursor, instead of being attached to
it as a drag action is being performed).

It would be greatly appreciated if someone can shed light on how to resolve
this. Thanks.

Jeff

 

[Elliott Roper]

Hello everyone,

I've been experiencing a problem with Word 2004. Scrolling through different
pages of long documents is extremely erratic and slow. For example, I would
scroll either with my mouse or the scroll bar, but the document would scroll
at an unusually slow speed, and would continue to scroll on its own for
awhile even after I have stopped using the scroll wheel on the mouse or the
scroll bar in the application.

This is a problem that seems to affect Excel as well. When I attempt to
either scroll through a spreadsheet or resize a row or column, the action
(which requires dragging the mouse at some point) would initiate very slowly
on screen so that the speed at which a row or column is resized is much
slower than the speed at which I am dragging my house (visualize an
expanding column slowly "following" the cursor, instead of being attached to
it as a drag action is being performed).

It would be greatly appreciated if someone can shed light on how to resolve
this. Thanks.

You may be experiencing general hardware and software slow down from a
number of causes.
Try these general recipes till something works:-
1. Quit and restart Word.
2. Log out and back in.
3. Reboot your machine.
(They will clean up any mess your system's swap file may have been in)

Make sure you have 10-20% of free space on your system disk.
(That will slow down the rate at which your new swap files become a
mess) When Word starts swapping (the system is juggling programs in
memory to make room for others) it runs like a slug.

The ultimate no swapping fix is a hardware one. Add more memory.
Don't go insane here. 1GB on a PPC or 2GB on an Intel Mac is plenty.

On top of that general stuff, there are a number of ways you can drive
Word for better speed.
1. Don't scroll. Use the keyboard. Page up and down and cmd-down and up
to leap across paragraphs is quicker and easier. If you know some text
string where you want to be; use find. I prefer to fly Word with the
scroll bars disabled. They take up too much screen space. And scrolling
is a hopelessly slow way of navigating, even when it is working
properly.

2. Use normal view rather than page view. I love page view, and I
successfully use it for large documents on a small slow PowerBook with
only 768MB by using the tricks in 1. But normal view does put a lighter
load on your computer.

3. Get rid of the word count and all the other nonsense at the bottom
of the window.

4. If your long document (by long I mean 200 pages or more) is well
structured with heading levels and styles in use, then hopping into
outline view briefly is an excellent way to leap to a new part of your
document.

5. If a particular document is far slower than the rest, it may be
corrupt.
Copy all but the last paragraph mark into a fresh document and see if
that isn't faster.