Very long document advice

[morejunk]

Hello,

I'm about to start writing my dissertation (cancer cell biology) and
I'm looking for some advice on how to bulletproof it (as much as is
possible). I can't have it corrupting on me and it's my understanding
that once a Word document gets about 100 pages long trouble quickly
follows. It's looking like my dissertation will be about 300 pages.

Things I already do (I read "Bend Word To Your Will" by Clive Huggan a
while ago):
1. I use styles religiously (even for things like simple italics, bold
& underline).
2. I have created my own templates and my own styles.
3. The headers and footers are very simple (page number and line
boarder only).

The two things that concern me are that there will be a LOT of
pictures in this document and I have to use automatic outline
numbering (it would be a giant pain to do it by hand). I'm told those
are both places were the chance of document corruption increases
substantially.


Thanks,
Adrian Mattocks.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Hi Adrian,

You should be fine. The idea that Word corrupts at 100 pages is just a
misguided rumor. I've got a dissertation of 374 pages that has behaved
fine for several years. That said, BACKUP your dissertation
constantly--email it to a gmail account daily or somesuch. Do a "Save As
[date or version#]" before beginning every major editing session (do not
trust Word's Versions feature).

General advice on very long documents is here, but it sounds like you
are largely doing much of it--browsing the page will give you a sense of
what else may come up.
http://daiya.mvps.org/bookword.htm

Images--don't necessarily corrupt, but do slow a long document down and
refuse to stay where you want them. Your life will be far far easier if
you keep the images in-line with text (just like they are their own
paragraph, and they will behave rationally like a paragraph) for the
entire process, or at least until just before printing out the final
copy. A common problem people have is that they want Word to flow text
*around* an image--eg, Figure 1 won't fit at the bottom of the page, so
they want Word to move two paragraphs from after Figure 1 to before
Figure 1 to make it look nice. Word won't do this--you would have to
fine-tune it manually, and you don't want to bother with any manual
cosmetic tuning and placing of images until you are just about done. I
think you'll want to use Insert | Caption to number/title your images.

Automatic outline numbering--set it up following this page exactly and
it should be pretty safe:
http://shaunakelly.com/word/numbering/OutlineNumbering.html

One thing--you've created your own styles? There are excellent reasons,
especially for a project like this, to use the built-in heading styles,
though you can customize them:
http://shaunakelly.com/word/numbering/UseBuiltInHeadingStyles.html

post back with any other questions,
Daiya

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Adrian:

To Word 2004 the document you are planning is "Medium". You are doing all
that is necessary for a document that size.

Once the document gets north of a thousand pages, you may have to use
external pictures to keep the file size down and improve responsiveness
while you work.

You can assist the transition of it becomes necessary by ensuring that your
picture source files are all in the same folder as the document file (not in
a sub-folder). It makes external pictures much easier to manage.

Cheers

Hello,

I'm about to start writing my dissertation (cancer cell biology) and
I'm looking for some advice on how to bulletproof it (as much as is
possible). I can't have it corrupting on me and it's my understanding
that once a Word document gets about 100 pages long trouble quickly
follows. It's looking like my dissertation will be about 300 pages.

Things I already do (I read "Bend Word To Your Will" by Clive Huggan a
while ago):
1. I use styles religiously (even for things like simple italics, bold
& underline).
2. I have created my own templates and my own styles.
3. The headers and footers are very simple (page number and line
boarder only).

The two things that concern me are that there will be a LOT of
pictures in this document and I have to use automatic outline
numbering (it would be a giant pain to do it by hand). I'm told those
are both places were the chance of document corruption increases
substantially.


Thanks,
Adrian Mattocks.

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John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
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