At work, I’m putting together an MS-Word doc with copied sections from a number of topics. The intent is for it to stay open all day long, and I can use it to answer various questions as they come in, look at diagrams of widgets and whatnot.
The file includes hundreds of pages of plain text and a healthy number of embedded diagrams (30KB JPEG, typically.)
It’s 2 days into this project and I’m noting the file hitting 5 MB. Load time is more than a couple of seconds, but not so long that it’s crippling if I keep it open all the time. Performance within the app seems rather good for now.
How big can I let this thing get before I’m going to run into trouble?
The machine running it it a PIV 3 GHZ with 1 GB of RAM and a 7200 RPM SATA-150 Seagate drive.
General workload includes Outlook and Word, with occasional IE usage to hit internal sites, along with two low-impact in-house apps.
I’d like a general answer on the topic of MS Word document size, as this machine will probably get replaced while I’m still using this doc.
We have Word files at work that are several hundred megabytes. They don’t generally cause any problems although I would be skeptical about pushing one close to a gigabyte or more.
I’d worry less about the size than about potential for corruption. When you copy stuff from other Word documents, Word brings the formatting over too. Sometimes this causes conflicts (especially with numbered lists) that can corrupt the document.
I wondered about the size of some of our specification documents, which are typically just a few pages. They seemed to be doubling in size everytime anyone edited them. We were ending up with 6Meg+ files with only six pages of sparse text and page headers. Pretty much the whole file was formatting, presumably duplicated every time someone pasted from another file(?) The trick to getting rid of all the excess crap was just to select all and copy-paste into a new blank document. Tada! File shrinks from 6 Meg to 70Kb.
0 KB. I’ve discovered that Word documents larger than that cause no end of trouble.
Umm, more usefully: turn off that “fast save” or whatever-its-called feature. Your saves will take longer but your files will be less inclined towards corruption, and it’s more of a risk the larger the file gets. Aside from which I believe fast saves bloat your file size: what gets saved is an addendum that essentially says “everything that came before this marker but with the following edits applied to it”, so all your deleted bits and former arrangements and formattings remain behind as well as the subsequent edits and additions when you do a fast save. (I am totally not a MS geek and anyone who is who has reason to believe I am misinformed should tell us both so. But while I’m unsure of the reason for it, I think I’m on pretty solid ground when I say turn off the fast saves)
edit because vBulletin thinks the post went thru when in fact it did not. this is to make it not be “the same post”.
I’m thinking you need to worry about maintainability as much as size.
Two tips for you:
Firstly, learn about Master documents and Subdocuments. So if the whole section on widget A needs updating, you can do it seperately then swap it in.
Second, don’t embed graphics but link to them. Have the graphics in seperate files. This way, if youve got multiple images of widget B in the documen, it’s only stored once, so if you change the source image it changes all the images in the document automatically.
I am quite intrigued by Master/Subdocuments, so I’ll look into that ASAP.
As far as multiple images, that’s not a risk with this document. Never a good reason to repeat a screenshot in this.
Aside from the master/sub doc you might save it as an html file and view it with your browser if all you’re using it for is reference and not making edits during the day.
Dual benefit of smaller file sizes without saving all the internal tracking data and it will keep you from accidentally changing something while you’re using it.
Use extreme caution with Word’s master document feature. They’ve never really gotten it to work right and most Word experts say to avoid it. Check this article out for more information.
Also, in theory, linking graphics is a good idea. I’ve had some trouble with it, but not enough to encourage you to run screaming – just enough to warn you to do a bit of research in advance. The Word MVP site I linked to above is a good source of info.
Thanks, but every time I get new data on the General Electric Widgetothopeter 9000 (Advanced Model, with Reinforced Reticulating Splines) I’ll be making fresh notes, and that happens a LOT, so… this thing’ll probably get added to 6 times a day.
Split it into 3-4 sections on some logical basis. Then keep all those sections open at once, using these new-fangled things the operating system has called windows.
Not only are they smaller files, less prone to corruption, but searching/updating/saving will be faster, too.
I think this goes for most Word features, no? Propensity to crash and fuck your document is proportional to the cube of difference between what you are doing in Word versus what you could do in WordPad.
It doesn’t need to be one huge document.
Part of the goal, however, was to be able to to EDIT -> FIND and get quick answers, rather than relying on MS Desktop Search.
In the absence of this thread, of course, I’d had no idea how big was too big, hence this thread.
I tried to use the Master/Subdocument feature for a big project I was working on some time ago. After hours of frustration and formatting issues, it just came to a big “Screw it”. It was easier to just have about 30 regular documents.
I was not thinking of that. (Desktop Search is yet another MS product I keep off my desktop.)
I was assuming that you could, as I said, ‘split it into sections on some logical basis’, and that when you got a question, you would know enough to determine which of the sections you needed to search for this question.
Unfortunately, the document is so lop-sided that splitting it would be difficult.
There are three major categories, but one of those is 70% of the lines.
Beneath that there are a solid 40 sub-categories, some of which will stay a few dozen lines, some of which are already hundreds of pages.
Only thing I could think of would be doing it in alphabetical order, which would annoy the sin out of me.