Hi Martin:

I think Jezebel's right: Word will be fine up to about 5,500 pages in a
single file.

It will start to slow down at 1,000 pages, and may be too slow to work
conveniently by 2,500 pages.

Really, the size of the file on disk is your biggest problem. Anything over
32 MB is pushing the friendship, anything over 100 MB will take forever to
save :-)

The changes you have made are part of good document housekeeping. Bulleted
and numbered lists are fine if you set up styles to apply them and apply the
bullets and numbering by applying the styles -- stay OUT of the
FormatBullets and Numbering dialog in a long document or it will corrupt.

Tables are fine provided you do not allow them to span more than about 20
pages, and turn off the "Automatically resize to fit the contents" option in
the table. Also: Set your tables Inline with Text, NOT floating.

Generally, "floating" anything is bad news: it uses a lot of CPU and memory
and contributes to problems.

Hope this helps


On 10/2/06 10:44 AM, in article ,
"MartinTosas" wrote:

Thanks Jezebel,

You know, I started this document in only one file, and it got
corrupted, I couldn't save it, each time I try to save it word would
crash. At that moment, the document only had about 50 pages! but no
template, no styles, lots of figures, which I use to insert (not linked)
inside textboxes, in order to be able to move them around.

So then I read lots of tips about how to work with word without
corrupting the document, and I radically changed the whole document. One
file for each chapter, linked inline figures, no text boxes (I use
tables instead if I need to put text in a box), no bullet or numbered
lists, I use templates, styles... however it's a bit of a pain to have
to deal with many files, mainly for cross-referencing to an item that is
in another file.

So now, I was thinking to put the chapters again in a single file...
:-) with some doubts about whether it would be alright.


Martin.


Jezebel wrote:
The short answer is, break it up when it becomes more convenient to work
with: if you find that it's becoming tedious to scroll or slow to load, then
break it up. But you probably won't need to. 300 pages is no big deal.

Sections and textboxes are not common causes of corruption. Perhaps you've
read about the problems with masterdocuments: these are notoriously prone to
corruption, to which sections are relevant. But in ordinary documents
sections are not an issue.


"MartinTosas" wrote in message
...

Hi there,

I have some doubts about whether to split a long document that I'm writing
at the moment into separate files.

From what size, and maybe, for what type of content, is it worth to
separate a word document into separate files? for example: one file for
each chapter.

The type of document I'm writing will be about 300 pages; with lots of
figures, which I insert inline and linked to .tiff files; and quite many
equations, which, I think, they are embedded objects from equation editor;
I don't use textboxes, and I don't use sections, because I've read they
could lead to corruptions???

What do you recommend for this type/size of document?

Cheers
Martin.






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