Word 2004 constant disk access

[amtravco001]

This has been a problem with Word 2004 for years. It gets into a mode
where every operation requires a disk access. I type a letter - I hear
the disk. I delete the letter - another access. I page down - big disk
access. I page up - another access. Of course, all this disk access
slows things to a crawl.

The problem is intermittent. I can restart Word and it will go away.
Then Word runs only at its ordinary frustratingly slow rate, but it is
sort of usable. (It's slow enough that I dread to have to scroll back 5
pages to look at something in my document. Instead, I split the pane in
two. This way, my scroll back may be slow, but I can get to my original
point simply by unsplitting the pane).

If anyone can solve this, they will have solved years of frustration
for me. BTW, I just happened to do a clean install of Tiger, and then
Word with all updates, and nothing has changed.

PB 667, 1GB ram.

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

I'd love to know how you got into that condition. It doesn't happen here
(or anywhere else that I have heard).

My first thought would have been "You're out of memory", but you have 1 GB
of memory...

So: What's ON the disk that Word is going for all the time?

We're talking about "letters", so presumably they're not full of graphics.
They are "short" documents, so Word is not paging out the editing buffer.

So: try this:

1) Quit Word

2) Reboot your computer (I want Unix to clean up its temporary files...)

3) Find your Normal template and rename it.

4) Restart Word. ONLY Word! Make sure Word is the only thing running for
this test.

5) Go to Word>Preferences>Save. Make sure Allow Fast Saves is OFF and
Always Make Backup is ON. Go to Tools>Track Changes>Highlight Changes...
Turn "Track changes while editing" OFF and turn the other two options ON.
This ensures you can see changes in the document if they have been tracked.

6) Create "Trash.doc", save it, and Quit Word (this ensures the new Normal
template is saved to disk).

7) Restart Word. Create a new document. Create a few paragraphs full of
junk text. Copy these and paste until you have about 100 pages worth. Save
the document.

Now, try editing and moving around in that document, and tell me what is
happening. Chances are, you won;t get your problem.

Now open one of your previous documents. Chances are your problem will come
back. If it does, the problem is likely to be a combination of Track
Changes and Fast Saves. Each of these causes Word to keep every editing
change you have ever made in a file on disk, in case you need to refer to
it.

If that happens in a document you are working on, Word will make constant
disk accesses looking for the changed text. If that has happened to your
Normal template, alll documents you touch will be slow.

Word keeps stuff on disk if you are out of memory, if you are editing with
tracked changes on, or if you have fast saves enabled.

Hope this helps

This has been a problem with Word 2004 for years. It gets into a mode
where every operation requires a disk access. I type a letter - I hear
the disk. I delete the letter - another access. I page down - big disk
access. I page up - another access. Of course, all this disk access
slows things to a crawl.

The problem is intermittent. I can restart Word and it will go away.
Then Word runs only at its ordinary frustratingly slow rate, but it is
sort of usable. (It's slow enough that I dread to have to scroll back 5
pages to look at something in my document. Instead, I split the pane in
two. This way, my scroll back may be slow, but I can get to my original
point simply by unsplitting the pane).

If anyone can solve this, they will have solved years of frustration
for me. BTW, I just happened to do a clean install of Tiger, and then
Word with all updates, and nothing has changed.

PB 667, 1GB ram.

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

 

[amtravco001]

Thanks, John, for the advice. I tried the steps you suggestedm, but the
problem persists (I already had the various preferences set as you
suggested). I should mention that the file I'm working on is very heavy
on graphics. It's got maybe 50 inline graphics, and hundreds of
MathType equations, which are a kind of graphic. The file is 40 pages,
but is 4.5 MB.

If I check the "Use picture placeholders" preference, then things are
fine, and there are no extraneous disk acesses. However, I need to see
the images in order to write.

BTW, are you saying that if I *ever* used Track Changes or Fast Saves,
I will continue to have this problem? Or should the problem go away if
I turn those off? Will a Save As help?

Thanks

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Are you using Page Layout View? If Word is constantly repaginating 40pages
with hundreds of graphics, I'm not surprised at the constant disk access.
Do you see constant disk access with shorter, less graphic-heavy documents?

If you are able to use Normal View (it should show inline graphics), that
ought to help.

 

[amtravco001]

As I said, if I turn of graphics (by choosing Use Picutre Placeholders)
it works fine, so clearly the heavy graphical nature of my document is
at the heart of the problem. Still, it seems like it should work.

I can read it in using Pages (Apple's new word processor) and it
scrolls just fine.

I also tried Normal view, but it's no better.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

As I said, if I turn of graphics (by choosing Use Picutre Placeholders)
it works fine, so clearly the heavy graphical nature of my document is
at the heart of the problem.

Your first post didn't sound like the problem was doc-specific at all, so I
wanted to double-check.

I can read it in using Pages (Apple's new word processor) and it
scrolls just fine.

I also tried Normal view, but it's no better.

Try unchecking "background repagination" in Word | Preferences, General, and
then see if Normal View is any better. That should turn off repagination
entirely (it's my theory repagination is causing the disk access).

DM

 

[amtravco001]

Darn. Background repagination was already off, so this wasn't it.

But I have made an interesting discovery. If I type a character, there
is a disk acess if the line that I'm typing on contains an equation,
but no access (mostly) if it does not contain an equation.

 

[amtravco001]

I emailed support at Design Science, the makes of MathType. This is
their reply:

The problem you described is a known, inherent issue with Microsoft
Word. Specifically it is that Word poorly handles large files that
contain a large number of images. Since MathType equations are PICT
images within the Word document, this problem manifests itself by
exactly what you describe; slow scrolling, slow document loading etc.

The only recommendations we can give are either to use your Picture
placeholders option in Word or to split the document out to several,
smaller files. Beyond this we cannot make additional recommendations
since this is a Word specific issue.

 

[amtravco001]

Another related bit of behavior: As I slowly scroll, every time a line
containing an equation enters the screen, there is a disk access. This
equation can be a single inline symbol, so it's not that it's a hug
graphic or anything. The basic problem is that it seems that all (?)
graphics are kept on disk somehow, and need to be retrieved every time
they need to be displayed. I'm hoping there is some preference
somewhere to force them into memory, but I can't find anything.

 

[amtravco001]

One last discovery, for anyone who's interested. I made up a mock
document with 400 PICT graphics of the letter "P" inline. It scrolled
slowly, but really not too bad considering how many graphics there
were. Then I replaced them with 500 MathType equations of the single
letter "P." The whole thing almost came to a halt. Scrolling 10 pages
of this would have taken many minutes. So it seems tobe an embedded
object issue (?), or maybe it *is* a MathType problem. It's not simply
too many graphics.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

I find that very interesting. Thanks.

One last discovery, for anyone who's interested. I made up a mock
document with 400 PICT graphics of the letter "P" inline. It scrolled
slowly, but really not too bad considering how many graphics there
were. Then I replaced them with 500 MathType equations of the single
letter "P." The whole thing almost came to a halt. Scrolling 10 pages
of this would have taken many minutes. So it seems tobe an embedded
object issue (?), or maybe it *is* a MathType problem. It's not simply
too many graphics.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

PS, cause I just noticed after previous message that there'd been no
response for a while. Actually, I've found all your posts very interesting,
and have escalated the thread to the MacBU. Thanks very much for
investigating and sharing the results.

The more this newsgroup can archive known information and experiences, the
more useful it is. Even if it seems no one is paying attention, you never
know who will search in the future.

 

[Jeffrey Weston [MSFT]]

Hello,

Thank you very much for posting this information to the Newsgroup. Word
indeed handles Embedded object differently from graphics, since embedded
objects or (OLE Objects) in this case are more complex. So that is a reason
for the differences in performance.

But I do hear concerns regarding the performance in general and will pass
this information for consideration for a future release.

Thanks for posting!
--
Jeffrey Weston
Mac Word Test
Macintosh Business Unit
Microsoft

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
Find out everything about Microsoft Mac Newsgroups at:
[http://www.microsoft.com/mac/community/community.aspx?pid=newsgroups]
Check out product updates and news & info at: [http://www.microsoft.com/mac]

 

[amtravco001]

Thanks for looking into this. It has been (and continues to be) a very
frustrating experience. But here's a mysterious bit of information. I
scrolled my document by holding down the little down triangle. To go 11
pages on my PowerBook 667 to 32 seconds. This is pretty agonizing. But
oddly, on my wife's iBook 800, the same document took only 9 seconds!

Now you could argue that there's something rotten with my installation.
But this is after a clean install of Tiger on a new, fast hard disk.
Then I immediately upgraded to 10.4.1. Then I installed Word and
upgraded to 11.1.1. So this is about as clean as you can be. There was
basically no difference that I could tell between Word's behavior
before and after this clean install.

My sense is that the difference between the PB and iBook times is that,
as I've stated, on the PB every time an equation is rendered there is a
disk access, while on the iBook things seem to be in memory.

Anybody have any idea why Word might continually ask for disk access on
one machine and not on another? Or if in fact there should be any disk
access to display equations (once they've been displayed once)?

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

Thanks for looking into this. It has been (and continues to be) a very
frustrating experience. But here's a mysterious bit of information. I
scrolled my document by holding down the little down triangle. To go 11
pages on my PowerBook 667 to 32 seconds. This is pretty agonizing. But
oddly, on my wife's iBook 800, the same document took only 9 seconds!

Now you could argue that there's something rotten with my installation.
But this is after a clean install of Tiger on a new, fast hard disk.
Then I immediately upgraded to 10.4.1. Then I installed Word and
upgraded to 11.1.1. So this is about as clean as you can be. There was
basically no difference that I could tell between Word's behavior
before and after this clean install.

My sense is that the difference between the PB and iBook times is that,
as I've stated, on the PB every time an equation is rendered there is a
disk access, while on the iBook things seem to be in memory.

Anybody have any idea why Word might continually ask for disk access on
one machine and not on another? Or if in fact there should be any disk
access to display equations (once they've been displayed once)?

If there's enough real RAM available, the application doesn't need to page
out to virtual memory on the disk. You can check up on this by looking at
Activity Monitor in Utilities.

--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

Please "Reply To Newsgroup" to reply to this message. Emails will be
ignored.

PLEASE always state which version of Microsoft Office you are using -
**2004**, X or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions
otherwise.

 

[amtravco001]

I have 1 GB of RAM, so that shouldn't be a problem. Latest tests:
Downloaded Office 2004 test Drive (just in case there was something bad
with my CD). No difference. Turns out my wife has Office X, not 2004.
So I ran Remove Office and installed Word X. It ran just as slowly as
2004 (and the screen fonts looked crappy). At work, tried 1.25 GHz G4
with Word X. Ran as fast as my wife's iBook.

 

[amtravco001]

My last word on Word: I went to the Apple store with my document and
tried it on all sorts of machines. The result is that Word, for this
document, is just plain slow. Faster machines of course scrolled
faster, but there wasn't any evidence that my machine is much slower
than its speed would dictate. On a dual-processor 2.7 GHz G5, Word
worked fairly well. I don't think Word is dual-processor aware,
though. It seems barely to be single-processor aware.

When this project is done, I will be moving to InDesign for the next
phase. I don't think Word is up to documents like mine, with lots of
equations. I don't see any reason it shouldn't be, though. Apple's
Pages zips right through it, equations and all. The equations are
editable in Pages as well. Unfortunately it lacks some features we
need-mostly auto numbering, cross references, and reviewing
capabilities. Maybe in 2.0.

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

When this project is done, I will be moving to InDesign for the next
phase. I don't think Word is up to documents like mine, with lots of
equations. I don't see any reason it shouldn't be, though. Apple's
Pages zips right through it, equations and all. The equations are
editable in Pages as well. Unfortunately it lacks some features we
need-mostly auto numbering, cross references, and reviewing
capabilities. Maybe in 2.0.

I guess it didn't occur to you that maybe the complexity of a document
structure that allows auto numbering, cross references, and reviewing
capabilities, etc. is precisely what makes it slower?

--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

Please "Reply To Newsgroup" to reply to this message. Emails will be
ignored.

PLEASE always state which version of Microsoft Office you are using -
**2004**, X or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions
otherwise.

 

[Jeff Wiseman]

I guess it didn't occur to you that maybe the complexity of a document
structure that allows auto numbering, cross references, and reviewing
capabilities, etc. is precisely what makes it slower?

This is always true to an extent. However, I personally believe
that it is more likely the long history of hacks, tweaks,
patches, rush to market updates, programmer "embellishments", and
other non-orthogonal exception-based software architectures in
the structure (if you can even call it that anymore) of the
application itself that contributes to these problems. And
remember, the core of this application was evolved to run on an
entirely different OS and hardware architecture from the Mac. The
Mac version is only a port.

My advice to most has been that IN GENERAL, if you can get away
without using Word, then do so as it will likely save you a lot
of grief. Although all computers and software can be problematic,
Word can be a beast, and for some users it can demand far more
knowledge than they have time in which to aquire it.

However, due to Microsoft's penetration into the market, many are
forced to live with it's bloated shortcomings. The fact that you
can even run Word on the Mac is a strange blessing

Complex features can slow the response on any applications, but
poor software structure and extensive exception based programming
can make it massively worse. As a result, 2 different
applications with the same feature sets can be significantly
different in behavior and response times.

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

If you have "finished" those equations, convert them each to "Pictures"
(Edit>Cut, Edit>Paste Special>"As picture...")

Then save and close the document. This can produce a dramatic speed-up.

Cheers

My last word on Word: I went to the Apple store with my document and
tried it on all sorts of machines. The result is that Word, for this
document, is just plain slow. Faster machines of course scrolled
faster, but there wasn't any evidence that my machine is much slower
than its speed would dictate. On a dual-processor 2.7 GHz G5, Word
worked fairly well. I don't think Word is dual-processor aware,
though. It seems barely to be single-processor aware.

When this project is done, I will be moving to InDesign for the next
phase. I don't think Word is up to documents like mine, with lots of
equations. I don't see any reason it shouldn't be, though. Apple's
Pages zips right through it, equations and all. The equations are
editable in Pages as well. Unfortunately it lacks some features we
need-mostly auto numbering, cross references, and reviewing
capabilities. Maybe in 2.0.

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410