Word 2003 Mail Merge Performance

[ac3now]

I used Excel as the datasource and it has 10,000+ records. My word
template has 1 pages and 10+ merge fields. It took over an hour to
merge to a new document with 10,000+ pages. The document was 400+MB in
size and took a while, at least 2 minutes to just open the document,
when I tried to scroll to the last page, it looked like it would take
forever.

Are there any ways to speed up the merge process or any workarounds
for my situation?

Thanks!

 

[macropod]

Any 400+MB document with 10,000+ pages is going to take some time to open and process. Unless there's a compelling reason to have so
many records in the one file, I'd suggest splitting the merge into a number of smaller jobs (eg 1,000 records each).

 

[Graham Mayor]

I think you did well to complete the merge. The fact that it is slow to load
or to navigate through a document of over 400 mb (when the quoted text limit
for Word is 32mb!) is not at all surprising.

When I first read your post, I created a small macro to insert a new page
section break at the bottom of a single page Word 2003 document, and paste a
page of text after the break, to loop 10,000 times. This is much the same
process as creating a merge document without the overhead of reading from an
Excel file to get the data for each of those 10,000 pages! After 15 minutes,
the process appeared to have hung so I broke out of the macro and found that
somewhat less than 6000 pages had been created - a document of 26 mb. I then
copied and pasted that document to the end to produce a document of over
11,000 pages (50 mb), which loads quickly but then takes an age to
repaginate, as you might expect, and the page counter loses the will to live
at 9,999.

A merge document will come with rather more baggage than a plain text
document, but 8 times as much? How big is the merge document before the
merge? Try pasting all of it except the last paragraph mark into a new
document and see how large that document is by comparison. If the merge
document has additional elements such as graphics, frames, tables etc, then
all bets are off.

The fact is that you are taking Word to places it was never intended to go
and are exploring the limits of performance of your PC. I would suggest that
you merge more manageable chunks of data into separate documents.


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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[macropod]

Hi Graham,

Even without exceeding the oft-cited 32MB text limit, a single graphic on each page could soon push the file size for a 10,000 page
document out over 400MB. And even Word 2007 chokes on file sizes anything over 512MB!

 

[Graham Mayor]

I am not sure where that 32 mb limit comes from. It is easy enough to create
'text only' documents larger than that (such as the 50mb 11,000 page jobby I
mentioned earlier).

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[macropod]

Hi Graham,

The 32MB limit comes directly from MS (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/211489) and supposedly applies to Word 2000-2007.
Unfortunately, it's been poorly expressed in the Help files. For example, in Word 2000's help file, it's expressed as "Maximum file
size -32 megabytes (MB)", without the benefit of the "for the total document text only" note in the KB article. In any event, I
doubt it's a true reflection of Word's capacity, since I too have created files with well over 33,554,432 characters (ie 32MB of
text) in Word 2000.

 

[Guest]

I think that complexity of the document is an important criteria too. Loads
of direct formatting instead of using styles will severely reduce the
potential size that you can produce.

Terry Farrell

Hi Graham,

The 32MB limit comes directly from MS
(http://support.microsoft.com/kb/211489) and supposedly applies to Word
2000-2007. Unfortunately, it's been poorly expressed in the Help files.
For example, in Word 2000's help file, it's expressed as "Maximum file
size -32 megabytes (MB)", without the benefit of the "for the total
document text only" note in the KB article. In any event, I doubt it's a
true reflection of Word's capacity, since I too have created files with
well over 33,554,432 characters (ie 32MB of text) in Word 2000.

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Cheers
macropod
[Microsoft MVP - Word]

I am not sure where that 32 mb limit comes from. It is easy enough to
create 'text only' documents larger than that (such as the 50mb 11,000
page jobby I mentioned earlier).

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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