Hi PopS
I shall assume you have read everything else in this thread, and make soe
remarks that may help:
1) Word 97 has the "old" table engine. It will cause less problems in old
documents, but it will not handle the nested tables that can occur in Word
2000+ documents. It is not very robust if you need to get into "mega"
documents.
2) Word 2000 is probably the professional's choice for very long documents.
It lacks the speed and power of later versions, but also lacks some of the
destructive bugs (sorry: "features") of the later versions.
3) Word 2002 is a toxic soup of bugs. Don't use it for anything
substantial.
4) Word 2003 is what I use when I need to get really serious. Very fast,
very powerful, not quite as stable as Word 2000 but the power makes up for
it. You have to know how to turn off the features that cause problems.
If you have better than 512 MB of memory and Windows XP on NTFS, you can
push Word 2003 to 5,500 pages in a single document. If you do, you better
have a fast disk and be good at waiting. But it will hang in there.
While you could follow Steve's article and use Master Documents, I
personally wouldn't... It's a lot of work and I would not select that
approach for your requirement. Single document and Outline View is the way
I would go.
But I would do it in Word 2003 on a grunty workstation.
Cheers
On 4/8/05 10:29 AM, in article
, "PopS"
wrote:
=== Inline please:
"Daiya Mitchell" wrote
in message
.. .
[I don't think any follow-ups are necessary, having
this available in two
places does not seem a problem to me]
I read your post kinda fast, so I may have missed
something.
Is there any good reason to keep your chapters in
different files? Since you
don't seem to be working with other people, why not
just combine all
chapters into one file?
=== Actually, that's what I was trying to say. A
single file and Outline View seem to give me just what
I need, but then that bit with Word Stopped Responding
popped its ugly head so I thought I'd check with some
of the folks here. It happened again, so I did a Shut
Down/Reboot and tried again; maybe that fixed it; so
far so good.
Though I have not studied Steve Hudson on using
Master Documents safely:
http://www.techwr-l.com/techwhirl/ma...dhomepage.html
I get the impression that you are never supposed to
do any editing in the
master, but only in the subdocument. So you
shouldn't spend much time in
Master Document view.
=== Same impression here. I suspect one has to be
more intimate with the internals of Word to actually
use MD, or at least have a strict policy to do so.
Your apparent question: Outline View vs. Master
Documents? doesn't totally
make sense to me.
=== Sorry, I was feeling pretty muddled when I wrote
that. Wish I could take it back and start over but ...
You didn't see anything about using Outline View to
replace Master Documents
because it's irrelevant, more or less.
=== That's what I was hoping to hear. It "seems"
irrelevant, but then MD wasn't an issue until some
folks started trying to use it in earnest.
The alternative to Master Documents is combining in a
single file. Outline
View makes this much easier, but it is simply a
feature of Word, not exactly
...
(see here just in case you don't know the full power
of outline view
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/UsingOLView.htm
=== ?? I have read that, in fact, but didn't notice
anything about Outline view's powers. I'll take a look
again; I thought it was all MD info.
It also kinda sounds as though you are editing the
entirety of the work and
may need to move Subsection 3.2 from Chapter 3 to
Chapter 4, in which case I
would say you definitely don't want to be using MDs,
as my inexperienced
impression is that that's the type of thing that
screws them up, when done
from the MD instead of via cut and paste from file to
file. A single file,
however, can handle that fine, and Outline View makes
it easier.
=== Yes, that's exactly what I need to do, and a lot
of it. These are documents that were accurate "way
back then", but now need some substantial redesign.
The first time I trashed it with MD mode was moving
chapters around rather than recreate it; it's rather
long. And, I don't do macros so automating a rebuild
has to be manual for me. The second time I trashed it,
all I was doing was update the TOC. I was trying to
get an idea how the changes were looking. I guess you
recreate TOCs too with MDs. I used to be able to use
MDs in old versions, but apparently not now. I'm also
not too sure just what resaving all the docs to current
WD format does to MD things, either.
Thanks for the comeback,
Pop
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John McGhie
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410