Speed up the opening of Word documents

[Steve]

I have some long Word 2003 documents (about 100,000 words and 2,700kb)
that I constanly edit that take more than 30 seconds to open . Whatever is
going on uses up so much memory that I can't do anything else on the computer
(Hp nx6320 with XP) in the meantime.
I have versions turned on and track changes turned off, and that's all.

I've emptied the temp folder- but to no effect.
I can temporarily rectify the problem by copying the text into a new
document - but that only works for a while before it goes slow again.
I do happen to have a macro program called Workspace Macro that I could use
to somehow automate this but is there a simpler way to either prevent or fix
it?

 

[Robert M. Franz (RMF)]

Hi Steve

I have some long Word 2003 documents (about 100,000 words and 2,700kb)
that I constanly edit that take more than 30 seconds to open . Whatever is
going on uses up so much memory that I can't do anything else on the computer
(Hp nx6320 with XP) in the meantime.
I have versions turned on and track changes turned off, and that's all.

With versions on, it's surprising that the document keeps at that size
in the first place. When you copy to a new document, you loose all
previous version information -- I'd switch versions off entirely and
make frequent use of "Save As".

Two things could happen during opening of your document: AntiVirus
software scanning the file, and automatic spell checking/hyphenation etc.

HTH
Robert

 

[Steve]

Hi Robert,
thanks for your answer. Actually you alerted me to a much more important
issue - the loss of the versions! I hadn't even thought of that - you may
well have saved me much grief down the track.
Still a mystery to me though why the new document would be necessarily much
faster (which it is ) than the old one. Maybe its just the versions
accummulating with the older documents do you think? Maybe I should go back
to track changes - or is that worse?

 

[Robert M. Franz (RMF)]

Hi Steve

Still a mystery to me though why the new document would be necessarily much
faster (which it is ) than the old one. Maybe its just the versions
accummulating with the older documents do you think? Maybe I should go back
to track changes - or is that worse?

If you were able to live with versions, I don't see why you couldn't
live with saving into individual files, also (MyDoc001.doc, MyDoc002.doc).

It's hard to suggest the best course of action w/o knowing what kind of
document we are dealing here. Long and constantly editing, well -- I
hope you'll be coming to an end someday! ;-)

TrackChanges I would use only in very controlled environments (namely,
same version of Word wherever the file is used).

HTH
Robert

 

[Poprivet]

I have some long Word 2003 documents (about 100,000 words and 2,700kb)
that I constanly edit that take more than 30 seconds to open .
Whatever is going on uses up so much memory that I can't do anything
else on the computer (Hp nx6320 with XP) in the meantime.
I have versions turned on and track changes turned off, and that's
all.

I've emptied the temp folder- but to no effect.
I can temporarily rectify the problem by copying the text into a new
document - but that only works for a while before it goes slow again.
I do happen to have a macro program called Workspace Macro that I
could use to somehow automate this but is there a simpler way to
either prevent or fix it?

The slowness is due to the version tracking; it has to keep all the old
versions in the file plus the latest version.

I get around that by, at the end of each day, saving the file to the same
name but with the date on it (eg 2007-05-21, etc). Same as versioning but
without the overhead.

The reason copying to a new file works is because you're not bringing
forward all the older versions into the new file. But, as you make changes,
the file versions begin to accumulate again and it will slow down again.
So, by doing that, you're losing a lot of your versions anyway, defeating
the purpose of versioning.

Another possibilty is to break the document into a few smaller parts;
chapters or sections, if you will, and edit those instead. Then reassemble
them all if I need to distribute or whatever.

I think you should rethink the why/how of using version tracking. And no,
change tracking won't help a thing either.

You supplied too little data for anything more definitive.

HTH
Pop`