Word 2003 - Tables performance

[brucewood]

I know this has come up here before... what I really want to know is
how to provide product feedback directly to Microsoft. I know about
their MSDN feedback page, but that seems to be mostly for programmers,
and doesn't include the option to comment on Office products.

I've read a lot of suggestions in this newsgroup and on-line about
improving performance for tables in Word. Unfortunately, all of these
Web pages imply that this was a problem starting in Word 97, or in Word
2000.

I was using Word 2000 up to a couple of months ago. It worked fine on
my laptop, including complex documents consisting primarily of tables.
I "upgraded" my laptop to Office 2003, and I'm horrified by the
performance when you put a table into a Word 2003 document.

I'm currently working with one document that consists almost entirely
of tables (it's a test plan). When I paste text into one of these
tables, or paste a new table into the document, it's go-for-coffee
time. Literally: I just pasted a two-row table into the middle of the
document, went down the hall, poured myself a cup of coffee, and came
back just in time to watch Word finish the paste operation. Absolutely
unbelievable. It was nowhere near this bad in Word 2000.

Has anyone else noticed this kind of order-of-magnitude degradation in
performance between Word 2000 and Word 2003? Does anyone know how to
kvetch directly to MS about this?

 

[Jezebel]

I'd suggest that this might be a problem with your specific document.
Certainly tables have been a problem area in Word. But they are not *that*
bad normally. In my experience W2000 was *worse* the W2003. There are some
combinations of table effects that cause issues; and tables that span a lot
of pages can be a disaster.

In your case, I'd be wary of the document going corrupt -- long delays on
pasting are sometimes a forewarning of a document about to collapse.
Separately, try moving the tables (one at a time or by section) to a new
document and see if the problem goes with them; and if you have very long
tables, try splitting them.

 

[brucewood]

Thanks for your suggestions. I took a more radical approach.

I rebuilt the document using colour coding for "test not done," "test
failed," and "test passed" instead of one table row per test. My new
document contains no tables. Word runs like spit now.

If anyone knows how to complain directly to MS, I'm still interested.