Slow page up and page down in tables

[Cat]

In Word 2004, I am finding that using page up and page down keys in
Tables is very slow, much slower than in Word X. I hit the key and it
takes fully seconds before the page changes.

Can someone else confirm this is or is it just me?

Anything I can do to get better speed? Changing from page layout to
normal doesn't speed it up. I've followed all the troubleshooting tips
and have no problems in that area.

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Cat:

Yes, Word 2004 will be slower in LONG tables.

Particularly if the document contains a lot of tracked changes.

Go to Tools>Track Changes>Highlight Changes... And make sure "Highlight
changes on screen is turned on and stays on, so you can see changes if they
are collecting in the document.

If you see lots of changes displayed, Accept All (or Reject All) if you
don't need them.

Now, Word will slow down badly if a table spans more than about 100 pages.
I suggest using Table>Split Table about every 20 pages while you are working
on a document. You can take these breaks out when you have finished
editing.

A corrupt table will be very slow. If you think the table may be corrupt,
select it all and convert it to text. Then convert it back to a table again
without moving your selection. This rebuilds its internal structure. Save
and close the document, then re-open and the speed improvement can be
dramatic.

Hope these help. Come back if these don't fix it, we have heaps more ideas


Cheers

In Word 2004, I am finding that using page up and page down keys in
Tables is very slow, much slower than in Word X. I hit the key and it
takes fully seconds before the page changes.

Can someone else confirm this is or is it just me?

Anything I can do to get better speed? Changing from page layout to
normal doesn't speed it up. I've followed all the troubleshooting tips
and have no problems in that area.

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Yes, Word 2004 will be slower in LONG tables.

Particularly if the document contains a lot of tracked changes.

Go to Tools>Track Changes>Highlight Changes... And make sure "Highlight
changes on screen is turned on and stays on, so you can see changes if they
are collecting in the document.

Side note: if you aren't tracking changes and don't want to, do not turn
this on. Just skip it. If you are tracking changes, make sure that View |
Markup is checked so that you can see them.

If you see lots of changes displayed, Accept All (or Reject All) if you
don't need them.

Also note that Word in any version does not like long single-row tables--if
you are using tables to produce long columns of text side-by-side, insert a
new row break every so often.

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Daiya:

Side note: if you aren't tracking changes and don't want to, do not turn
this on. Just skip it. If you are tracking changes, make sure that View |
Markup is checked so that you can see them.

What you say is, of course, quite correct.

However, personally, I warn users quite strongly not to do that. If you
turn "Highlight changes on screen" OFF, you then cannot see whether the
document has any tracked changes stored in it. If you then type or edit in
the document, you run the risk that you will by typing into deleted text
areas. If you do, the chances of corrupting the document become very great.

You also have no easy way of knowing that text that you delete is not
leaving the document. It will remain in there, waiting for you to Accept
the change. You cannot see it, but the person who gets the document next
can. And if you just produced a sales letter by editing the one you send to
the previous customer, you may be severely embarrassed to know that your
next customer can see, character for character, the differences in the offer
you are making to him!

Or if you are the British Prime Minister, you may severely wish that the
Press had not been able to discover that your report on Weapons of Mass
Destruction was largely fiction

So I always tell users to turn Highlight Changes ON and leave it on. If
there are not changes in the document, it will do nothing. But it is easy
to mistakenly turn Track Changes on without intending to. There's a button
marked TRK towards the right at the extreme bottom of the Word window. It
is easy to hit it by mistake, but difficult to see whether it's on or off.
If you do hit it by mistake, you are then collecting tracked changes in the
document. Everything looks normal, but your deletions are not going away.

This is a big issue out there in Word-land. Most of the corrupt document
issues I see are caused, one way or another, by users not realising that
tracked changes were on. Most corporate employees do not really know what
tracked changes are, let alone how to use them. Microsoft has attempted to
respond to this by including a warning in Word 2004 that will tell you if
you are saving a document with tracked changes in it. But the warning
annoys users who do not understand tracked changes, so they turn it off

Also note that Word in any version does not like long single-row tables--if
you are using tables to produce long columns of text side-by-side, insert a
new row break every so often.

This, on the other hand, is a very valuable point that I should have thought
of

Hope this helps

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

However, personally, I warn users quite strongly not to do that. If you
turn "Highlight changes on screen" OFF, you then cannot see whether the
document has any tracked changes stored in it. If you then type or edit in
the document, you run the risk that you will by typing into deleted text
areas. If you do, the chances of corrupting the document become very great.

Right, my mistake! I confused the "highlight changes on screen" checkbox
with the "track changes while editing" checkbox that is under Tools | Track
Changes> Highlight Changes... and that turns Track Changes on and off.
Should've read more carefully. I did however, just discover that the View |
Markup command checks and unchecks the "highlight changes on screen"
checkbox.

 

[Cat]

Side note: if you aren't tracking changes and don't want to, do not turn
this on. Just skip it. If you are tracking changes, make sure that View |
Markup is checked so that you can see them.
Also note that Word in any version does not like long single-row tables--if
you are using tables to produce long columns of text side-by-side, insert a
new row break every so often.

Well, thanks for all these suggestions but I'm talking about a simple
table, maybe 2 pages long. I just created an empty two page table, 6
columns, 80 rows. It still pages up and down unacceptably slowly. I
can't see how this can be due to corruption, tracking changes etc. Any
suggestions?

Cat

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Cat:

That "can" be due to tracked changes, but if there are no tracked changes,
then:

* The table is corrupt
* The document is corrupt
* Word is out of memory
* The computer is out of CPU cycles

To check for a corrupt table, convert it to text (Table>Convert>Table to
Text) and back again. Save, Quit, Re-open (to force a full save of the
document and empty the memory).

To check for a corrupt document, quit word, rename your Normal template,
restart Word, copy all but the last paragraph to a newly-created document.

To check for Word out of Memory, close all of the other applications.
Better: Restart the computer and then close all the other applications. If
Word then speeds up, that was it: off to your local computer shop and buy
yourself some more RAM. 1 GB of RAM is a nice round number for serious work
in Word. You can, of course, get away with half of that if you do not do
much long document work.

If your CPU is slower than 1 GHz, you will find that it helps a lot not to
run many other applications while working on complex documents. OS 10.3 is
not very efficient about sharing the CPU. It seems to be tuned to hand out
large slices of CPU time and widely-spaced intervals. Word likes very short
slices of time very frequently, and it can bog down a bit if the box is busy
doing other things.

If you still can't find a solution, turn off all of the "Automatically
resize..." options you can find in that table. "Squeezy" tables and table
cells are fearsomely power-hungry.

Cheers

Well, thanks for all these suggestions but I'm talking about a simple
table, maybe 2 pages long. I just created an empty two page table, 6
columns, 80 rows. It still pages up and down unacceptably slowly. I
can't see how this can be due to corruption, tracking changes etc. Any
suggestions?

Cat

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410