Large word document (53.4 MB) Running Slowly. Advice?

[Forbig]

Hi all.

I work with a lot of large ms word documents, all text, no pictures. They tend to be slow in saving, requiring a few seconds to save rather than doing so as quickly as smaller word documents.

Is there anything I can do to speed up my interactions with these larger documents?

thanks!

[DivineEvil]

Do you use MS Office 2007? If so are the word files in .doc or .docx format. If they are .doc, covert them in .docx. Docx are a lot smaller than doc especially if there are no pictures!

[After G]

Don't use Word ... I kid :p

I remember a trick that used to work in old versions of Word. Copy all the text from the old doc, paste it into a new document, and save. For some reason, Word keeps a bunch of old crap around in the file after a while. Dunno if it will still work, but its worth a shot.

[Forbig]

Thanks Divine. I did try that - did not help. Maybe a better question would be: what is an ALTERNATIVE to MS Word that wouldn't give me problems? I'm totally open to suggestions!

Thanks in advance.

[DivineEvil]

Try OpenOffice.org...

[kufford]

If you're writing 53 meg documents, it's time to try LaTeX and watch your document formatting woes disappear. Link in sig if interested.

[RobMoss]

Would it not be a good idea to split this up into several smaller files..? I'm just thinking how you'd feel if it got corrupted and you lost the lot, rather than just a small part of it.

[CylonGlitch]

I am guessing you're writing a book or a manual of some type. I know that in Word there was a book format that you could use. What this did was that each chapter could be saved off as a different document and then the top level would be the completed book. Thus you could, in theory break that 50meg file into ten 5 meg files; and only the file that changes would need to be saved thus saving time.

Anything that rewrites the entire file will take this long, because that time is based on the speed of your drive at this time. Sure there is the pre processing and format setup; but all formats need to do this. Some apps may be better then others, thus try as many as you can and let us know. But using multiple files would be a better solution.

[iShater]

Check if versioning is enabled. That makes the document sizes bigger and takes more time to save.

Copying the contents to a NEW document as was mentioned is a good idea to get rid of old history information IF YOU DON'T NEED that.

When working with such huge documents, saving them will take several seconds unfortunately.

[Forbig]

After applying what you all have suggested on MS word, the program is still running slowly.

To change the question, does anyone know of a word processing program that would allow me to create hundred+ paged documents and not run slowly? Or is it just my computer (I have a macbook).

thanks again.

[balamw]

After applying what you all have suggested on MS word, the program is still running slowly.

To change the question, does anyone know of a word processing program that would allow me to create hundred+ paged documents and not run slowly? Or is it just my computer (I have a macbook).

thanks again.

As kufford said above, have you considered LaTeX (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX)? Especially if your document contains any math or equations it rocks, but it is great even for just plain text documents with formatting.

Actually LaTeX is awesome for complicated documents with lots of figures and the like, it just isn't WYSIWYG (at least out of the "box").

B