Weird scrolling behavior in Word 2003

C

Colleen

I will try to describe this as best I can.

This user works with fairly long documents (50-75 pp) which have tracked
changes and automatic paragraph numbering tied into styles. When he wants
to edit on a page far down in the doc, he typically holds down his Page Dn
key until he gets to a page half to ¾ way down, and usually he has overshot
his mark and needs to press the up arrow key to get up to the text he needs.
A few seconds into his up arrowing, the screen will briefly freeze, then his
cursor has suddenly transported to page 3 or 4. It happens consistently when
he is up arrowing, and it never places the cursor at the very top of the doc,
or on later pages, (page 20, e.g.) just page 3, 4 or 5. He prefers the
keyboard, so I don’t know if it would happen if he tried scrolling with the
mouse. I did suggest he use Edit Find, to get to a spot that far down in a
long document, but he prefers the Page Dn, up arrow method.

He says it happens in many different documents – including documents created
from other offices. I tried it out on my PC and didn’t have any problems
doing what he did. He is the type of user who doesn’t want anyone touching
his computer, so I wasn’t actually able to test it out on his PC.

I did find an article in the KnowledgeBase about slow scrolling in Word docs
with 100 or more consecutive automatic numbered paragraphs. His could easily
have that many numbered paragraphs (I haven’t counted), but I think the
article described the behavior when using the mouse. His is always using the
arrow keys.

He rarely uses other programs, so I don’t know if this happens in anything
other than Word. I did have him pull up a long web page in Internet
Explorer, but we didn’t see any problems.

One other thing he’s noticed, which may be related, is that sometimes when
he’s moving up, a line of text will suddenly be repeated many times on the
screen. He was not able to demonstrate this. To me, it sounds like a screen
refresh or low memory problem, but he didn’t describe in very much detail.
It doesn’t seem to be as consistent as the first problem I described.

Thanks for any suggestions,

Colleen
 
D

DeanH

This does sound like a screen refresh issue, especially when Track Changes is
active combined with autonumbering. Auto numbering usually wont have this
effect on its own. The duplication of lines (espeically at page breaks) is
also a refresh problem.

Does the document have a Table of Contents? Can the user navigate from here
to the position 1/2 - 3/4 way down via the section number in the TOC? Do the
screen freeze this time? If the Web toolbar is used, the Back and Forward
arrows allow navigation toggling.

Also can you ask the user (since he does not want you to touch his PC) to
copy the offending document, accept all changes within this copy, select the
whole document (Ctrl+A), then F9 to update all fields. Now do the symptoms
remain?

By the way 50-75 pages is not fairly long in Word World and these symptoms
should not occur in such a "small" document.
Come back if you need further assistance.
DeanH
 
C

Colleen

Thank you for your reply.

The document he showed me did not have a TOC, but he says it happens in many
documents, so it’s possible some of those may have a TOC.

I will ask him to try the 2nd method you described, but I have to ask (since
I know he will ask me), what fields might be in the document that would cause
this to happen?
 

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