How large a word doc. can one reasonably work with?

[Rahul]

Hi,

I'm about to emark on a report writing project that could run to , say,
around 200 pages. The other tricky thing is that I do have several large
figures and Many cross refs to Captions etc.

I've heard lots of horror stories here and elsewhere about how word
sometimes corrupts these kind of docs. Any advice about how I can avoid
pitfalls?

Sometimes, my version complains its low on memory. Although I do have a
reasonable 1 GB of RAM. Any settings tweaks? Or memory hogging frills I
should disable?

Are hyperlinked TOC's and TOF's a bad idea? I mean I could live without them
and I'm wondering if that is a corruption-magent!

Also this report has to be constructed from 3 or 4 smaller docs that I
already have ready. Should I just do this manually? From soom google
searches I suspect I should be fleeing away from Master-Documents as fast as
I can. What do you advise MVPs?

Or are things so bad that I will be forced to migrate to LaTex?

-Rahul

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I'm currently working on a 600-page document with over 500 footnotes. There
are numerous cross-references and over 100 illustrations. It seems to be
perfectly well behaved. The *only* issue I have noted is that if I press
Shift+F5 on opening (to return to the last editing point) before it has
finished repaginating, it may not go to the right place.

 

[Rahul]

Thanks Suzanne!

May I ask what's your system spec? Do you have huge amounts of RAM or a
blazing fast processor?

Have you tweaked your installation in any way? Any tips / guidelines that
you'd recommend a newbiee with large docs?

Thanks!

-Rahul

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I currently have a relatively new computer with 2 GB of RAM, but until a few
months ago I was working on the same document on a six-year-old system with
384 MB of RAM, and it may have been a bit slower (and I hadn't inserted the
graphics), but I've done comparable documents on even older, slower
machines.