Sorting on large documents

[malarson]

We've recently been having trouble running a sort on a
large Word document. We have to break it into a number of
different segments, sort everything separately, then paste
back together and run follow-up sorts. There must be an
easier way. Does anyone know what it is? Is there a setting
we could change that would allow more memory to be devoted
to Word and would then allow us to run larger documents?
Thanks -
MA Larson

 

[Klaus Linke]

We've recently been having trouble running a sort
on a large Word document. [...]

Hi MA,

What kind of trouble?

Sorting large tables can take quite a bit of time (a couple of minutes for
tables with several thousand lines).
Sometimes it's difficult to see if Word has "frozen" or is still sorting.

Converting "text to table" or "table to text" can take a few minutes, too.

Perhaps the amount of memory installed can help. I have a rather slow
machine, but with 512 Megs of memory, and haven't had too many problems
sorting large tables.

If you can do without tables: Sorting tab-delimited text should be quite a
bit faster.
You can sort paragraphs with "Table > Sort", too, and even choose the
different "columns" (= "fields") as sorting keys in paragraphs with tabs.

Regards,
Klaus