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Jay Freedman Jay Freedman is offline
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Default URGENT: Table format slows down document in Word 2003

Carole Sigouin, Sr. Technical Writer wrote:
Would you have a solution to this problem? This 135-page document
(2.5 Mb) contains 2 large tables designed for a Glossary. It slows
down tremendously every time a person wants open it, work with it or
save it (it spools and analyzes the document endlessly...).

We're converted it as a Tab Delimeter format for ease of use but, it
is difficult to read and not easy to maintain. Would you have any
suggestions or this is a limitation in Word, not being able to handle
and compute large tables?

Carole


Word has always had trouble handling extremely long tables -- the article
http://www.word.mvps.org/FAQs/TblsFl...FastTables.htm was written about 6
or 7 years ago, and not much has changed with respect to the items listed
there.

Split the tables into segments that are no more than 5 to 10 pages long, and
keep the document that way as long as it's being edited. You might want to
recombine the tables in a copy of the document in order to print it with
proper page breaks.

As an example, I've used Word tables to prepare an index/glossary from page
proofs of a textbook, generating more than 8000 table rows covering 185
pages. By never allowing any single table to exceed about 50 rows, I was
able to work on it with no noticeable slowdown.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
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