Re: Large documents in Word for Mac
- From: "John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]" <john@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 10 Apr 2005 11:35:50 +1000
Hi Emmanuel:
On 8/4/05 19:17, in article BE7C18DA.8623%Emanuel@xxxxxxxxxxx, "Emanuel
Vahid Towfigh" <Emanuel@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> currently, I am preparing a document with some 300 pages.
I thought you said "large" :-) In Microsoft Word 2004, anything over 500
pages is "large", anything under than is just a normal document, and should
be treated the same way :-)
> As it is divided
> in different chapters, I have so far worked on 5 different documents, and it
> was nice to handle. However, now I need to merge these documents, so that I
> can insert cross-references, table of contents and an index.
Simply use Insert>File to add your five files to the text of a new document.
That will combine them all as a single document and save you enormous
amounts of trouble. Yes, there are other ways of doing it, but for a
document of that size, you don't need them.
> Up to now, when I needed to print a draft of that document, I used to
> assemble the parts as subdocuments in a master document. This, however, is a
> little annoying, as Word does not save the settings for the footnotes, that
> is the footnote separator and the footnote continuation notice. As these
> have effect on the amount of text that fits on my pages this is a pain, as I
> have to redo these settings every time I open the doc and then word needs to
> repaginate... -- Is there any workaround known for this problem?
No. The footnote properties are a "Document" property. I am assuming that
you are using the "throw-away master document" technique? This means you
discard the master document after each use. When you do, you discard the
document-level settings in it.
The alternative would be to keep the master document in service. If you
were to make that mistake, as Daiya has warned, you would inevitably get
document corruption after a few edits.
You could use a macro to instantly reset your footnote properties in the
master document, and that's what I would do. This means using an Attached
Template to store settings for the master document. Look up Templates in
the help, and I suggest that you do not use Normal template for the purpose.
Or if you do, keep lots of backups. Normal template tends to die from time
to time, so you really need to have a working system that enables you to
throw it away without cost when it does. Look up the Organizer in the Help
and learn to use that to provide backups for your Normal Template.
> Now in connection with this problem, my second question is how experiences
> are with large documents (as I said, around 300 pages). I am working on a
> PowerBook 867 MHz with 512 MB RAM, and I have loads of footnotes and
> cross-references.
That's too slow for long or complex document work. I have a 1.2 GHz iBook
with 1GB of memory, and it's too slow for serious work also. Your PowerBook
will go a lot better if you double the memory. However, Word also needs a
fast motherboard and a fast hard disk to perform well, and no laptop has
those.
> Does it make sense to unify all in one document (like in
> one *real* document, not just subdocuments), as long as I still need to work
> on it, e.g. inserting cross-references?
Yes. However you will have a particular problem with cross-references in
Word 2004, due to the introduction of the ATSUI text engine, which slows the
insertion of cross-references down to a crawl. If you can, use Word 2001 or
Word X for cross-referencing, or keep your eye on
http://www.word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/index.htm
I've just written an article and tool to partially address the problem. The
article is currently being reviewed prior to publication.
Cheers
--
Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.
John McGhie <john@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410
.
- References:
- Large documents in Word for Mac
- From: Emanuel Vahid Towfigh
- Large documents in Word for Mac
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