"Robert M. Franz (RMF)" wrote in message
...
Hi Rhino

Rhino wrote:
Is there anything I can do to make it easier to scroll within large
documents?

I have a very large document that I am trying to edit in Word. By large,
I
mean 1077 pages.

How large in terms of filesize? If this is practically text-only, you can
use it. If you have a lot of graphics, long tables etc, expect a lot of
[insert your favourite "toxic" here] breaks ...

The document is all text; not a single graphic or table in it. The document
is roughly 2,600 KB in its original .txt format and balloons to 3,800 KB in
Word _before_ I've done the reformatting that I plan.

I've only just loaded the document into word but I'm finding it takes a
very
long time to scroll up and down with the document; I can click the up or
down arrow on the slider and go away for 10 or 15 minutes only to find
the
hourglass still spinning when I come back; my document is still on its
current page and hasn't moved in the desired direction at all.

I've got 512 MB of memory and the computer is running an Athlon 1700 so
it
ought to have enough horsepower; I'm guessing that it is Word which is
struggling in trying to move around within the document.

I would not want to work with any long document with only 512 MByte of RAM
these days. Processor speed is often not an issue (well, I have to work
with a Pentium II notebook once a week this month, not too funny! .-))
unless you have a lot of macrocode running which will profit from CPU
power. I'd try to get at least 1 GByte.

Unfortunately, I need to do this with my existing equipment, end of story.

What can I do to make this a much less painful task? I don't actually
have
too much editing to do but if I have to wait 15 minutes every time I try
to
scroll down a page it's going to take me until retirement to get this
done.

Aside form the structure of the document: Work in normal and outline view.
Almost exclusively.


Is there anything in the Options that will help with this?

Shut down most of the AutoFormatWhenYouDon'tLook stuff if you haven't
already. I would not want to use spell/grammer-checker, too.

Could you be more specific on what I should shut down and where I can find
those features to shut them down? I'm new to Word and am not fluent in
finding my way around yet.

Should I break the document down into smaller subdocuments and then link
the chunks into the master document? If that is the right approach, what
is a good size for the subdocuments? After all, if I make the subdocs too
big, I may be no further ahead in terms of scrolling performance but if I
make them very small, it increases the amount of work because I have to
create all of these smaller documents.

Don't go near master/subdocuments without an extensive study of the
relevant "literature" (search for "Word heretic masterdocument" or such
stuff).

Fair enough; I've been warned :-) Sounds like one of those "religious
arguments" with various schools of thought about what is the Right Way to do
things....

You could investigate into splitting into smaller fragments ("chapters" of
a small 3-digit number of pages maybe) and build your own "master" with
INCLUDETEXT fields. Or leave the last step and use RD fields for the
compilation of TOCs, INDEX, etc.

So this is a way to get the effect of subdocuments without actually using
subdocuments? I've never heard of INCLUDETEXT fields or RD fields before but
I just found them in the Word Help so I now have a glimmer of an idea how to
use them. I think I'm going to need to knock together a simple prototype so
that I can experiment with the required techniques for building documents
this way.

Okay, thanks for the guidance. I'll look into this and come back here if I
have any further questions.

--
Rhino