OK, now we have Nettiquette out of our system, let's try and answer this :-)

Word will cope happily with a 2,000 page document.

I recently published a 2,500 page document that was automatically assembled
from 400 source documents using a macro.

The absolute limit is around 5,500 pages. But the "consideration" is
'speed'. Word starts to slow down when it starts running short of memory.
Don't even think of handling large documents on a PC with less than 512 MB
of memory, and ensure that the file system of the local machine is NTFS.
Anything else and you are likely to get failures when things get big.

I would prefer to handle such documents on a workstation. Personally I use
a dual-Zeon workstation with 4 GB of memory, but that's overkill :-)

To prevent file corruption:
* make sure that all documents are created from the same template.
* Make sure you handle tracked changes carefully -- particularly to avoid
changes within or on top of changes.
* Perform all formatting using styles.
* Turn on Show/Hide so you can see your paragraph marks. Teach the users
to run with paragraphs on, and train them that the paragraph mark is the
most important character in the paragraph: it holds ALL the formatting :-)
* Forbid the use of FormatBullets and Numbering. Make up a proper set of
linked numbering styles as explained by Shauna Kelly (www.shaunakelly.com)
and apply all numbering via styles.
* With a document of that size, it's best to work with pictures linked but
not embedded: but make sure you train your users HOW before trying that...

The best way to combine the daily files would be using InsertFile. Make a
macro to automate this. I use a naming convention that causes the files to
sort in the correct order alphabetically in the folder.

Hope this helps

On 17/2/06 1:41 AM, in article
, "NYSA-HD"
wrote:

We have created a program in VB & VBA that assists users in creating midsize
documents daily. There will be one file for each day anywhere from 3-25
pages in length. We need to combine these documents once a year into one
large file to be published into a book. The document is straight text. No
images. In the end it will be approximately 1500-2000 pages in length
including table of contents and index. We hope to index and do TOC using
Word's automated features. Before we attempt this I would like to know any
limitations of Word. Can Word handle a document of this size? What do we
need to do to prevent file corruption? Are there any special steps we need
to take? What is the easiest way to combine all the daily files into one at
the end? We looked at Master Docs but read about corruption.



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John McGhie
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410