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Subject:Re: Any Word on Word? From:Sella Rush <sellar -at- APPTECHSYS -dot- COM> Date:Fri, 16 Oct 1998 10:45:18 -0700
There are lots of reasons why Word may not be handling an individual's
documents well. Many (although not all) problems attributed to Word come
from the user's lack of knowledge about the situation. I've worked with
Word files up to 4MB in size, with lots of graphics and few problems. A few
things to consider:
*Free hard drive space, RAM. One poster mentioned how slow Word is when
typing. This is likely not due to Word itself, but probably insufficient
memory or a very full hard drive. A good rule of thumb I've heard is to
keep at least 10% of your hard drive free to keep performance from
nosediving. On a 2 GB hard drive, that's 200 MB to keep free. In my
experience, the amount of RAM has the greatest impact on performance. It's
only been a couple of years since 16MB was considered adequate. These days
new computers are selling with 64MB standard, and a lot of people on this
list and the Winhelp list advocate 128MB minimum. (I'm working with 80MB
and have few problems.) There are lots of other more technical reasons
having to do with system setup and program interaction, but addressing these
two issues should allow you to do a 100 page document with graphics.
*How graphics work and how Word handles them. There is no reason for Word
to be incapable of handling a short document with only 3 graphics. Many
people on this list know a lot more about handling graphics than I do, but
here are a few simple pointers. (1) Use Word97. Period. Previous
versions converted all graphics to Windows metafiles, which are very large.
I routinely have to convert Word 97 files with graphics to Word 6, and file
size explodes (300KB to 3MB). (2) Learn about graphic formats and number
of colors, and how these affect file size. One day I spent an hour saving a
single graphic under different formats and with various numbers of colors.
It taught me a lot about the difference between a .bmp and a .gif. Choose
the format and number of colors resulting in the smallest graphic file size
that will still get you the result you need. For example, screen shots may
look fine at 256 or even 16 colors, so why use 16 million? My company
doesn't produce color material, so I use 16 colors greyscale for
screenshots, which looks great.
Having defended Word (gosh, was that me?), I have to agree that Frame has a
lot of indisputable advantages over Word, in particular for very large
documents and master documents. However, the original poster mentioned
Pagemaker, not Frame, as the Word alternative. I've *heard* that Page,
while terrific for small documents, is not very friendly for large
documents--it wasn't designed to be. It was designed to do small projects
like brochures, newsletters, etc. I use the same graphics practices with
Page as I do with Word.
Sella Rush mailto:sellar -at- apptechsys -dot- com
Applied Technical Systems (ATS)
Bremerton, Washington
Developers of the CCM Database
