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Subject:Re: Maximum File Size For Word Documents From:kcronin -at- daleen -dot- com To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Sun, 23 Mar 2003 21:37:00 -0700
Tom wrote:
> I have a quick question for all you Word gurus. I'm using Word 2002, and I have a
> file approaching 400 pages and just over 147,000 words in length. Needless to say,
> it opens kinda slowly. Not a lot of graphics or tables, but I do have a few. Mostly,
> the file is text.
>
> Does anyone have any experience on file sizes in Word. Where would you cut off a
> file and go to a second one? Also, if you have any hints on how to link the files
> together for maintenance, since Word lacks a reliable 'book' feature, ala
> FrameMaker, I would be interested.
I think file size is more of an issue than page count or word count, and you didn't mention how big that file was. A friend of mine's novel contains 169,000 words, but it's less than 700KB in size, so it behaves fine. But I've had 30-page docs with lots of inefficiently inserted graphics that balloon the file up to 7 MB. At that point, Word gets a little dicey to say the least.
I think you're pretty safe up to 2 or 3MB, from my experience. Tables seem to cause the most problems for me - I frequently complete RFP responses that have hundreds and hundreds of rows of tabular Q&A, often auto-numbered. In those cases, I find it helpful to sacrifice a few small animals, scatter their bones, and chant a bit - anything to beseech the Word Gods. YMMV.
Sources I trust (such as Woody Leonhard) have warned me away from using Word's Master Document feature, so I can't give you any advice in regard to making it act like Frame. I don't try to get Word to combine documents - instead I often end up manually creating a master TOC for a set of documents, to guide the user through the stack of files I've created. But I think there are a few advocates of Master Docs on the list - maybe they'll chime in.
Good luck!
Keith Cronin
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