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Large Document Creation
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. -- Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email me unless I ask you to. John McGhie Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410 |
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