Why the Word gets slow as we hover over the “table of contents”?



I’m wondering why it takes relatively long time in case we need to update the table of content or even when we hover over it!

Thank you for the help,

Best

Jamal

Attached Images

Clip_173.jpg (86.8 KB, 26 views)

Hi Jamal,

Your TOC is inside a content control, which implies you've created via one of the built-in options from the TOC Gallery on the References|Table of Contents. These do cause problems sometimes, especially if the TOC has many entries. Then, it might take a while to evaluate. You'll get better results if you create the TOC via References|Table of Contents|Insert Table of Contents or via Insert|Quick Parts|Field>TOC.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Many thanks guys for the reply.

The answer you have supplied is certainly logic. But why the Word gets slow as we hover over the TOC without asking to update the content?

For example, in the attached docx file, if you just open the file and go through the pages passing the page of table of content then the word gets slow! And really slow to the degree that we can’t proceed going through the rest of the pages of the file!

why doesn't do the same regarding the list of figures, tables or caption?

What might be the explanation for this behavior?

Best

Jamal

Attached Files

Template.docx (100.4 KB, 10 views)

An automatically-generated Table of Contents in Word is a very complex field structure. There's a lot more there than the text. Each entry is essentially a nested field. Each one has to be individually analyzed to display (or print) the text.

Hi Jamal,

The issue only affects TOCs created via the Gallery. Word has to do a lot of work behind the scenes to maintain a TOC field. For example, in addition to the formatting, for which every line has a Style to apply, every line contains two other fields - a HYPERLINK field and a PAGEREF field.

I don't notice any slowdown scrolling through your attachment, but some slowdown might occur in the full document if it has many pages and graphics - especially graphics. A lot of processing effort is required to render a multi-page document that has many graphics.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Thank you Paul for the elaboration.

appreciated

Jamal

All answers to Jamal are incorrect. We're talking about serious lags when scrolling by a TOC in Word 2010, with i7 processor and 8GB of RAM, not some old computer that struggles. Also, it happens with very small documents and simple TOCs. Definitely not something you can explain away by the complexity of a TOC. Looks like a bug in Word.

Thank you for your opinion, but you are wrong.

I have a variety of documents with TOCs, ranging from a few pages to hundreds of pages with TOCs spanning from a few lines to 9 pages (with 292 entries) and, except for when the TOC is actually being updated, the performance hit in viewing & scrolling through the documents compared to a plain document with no TOC is immeasurable. And that's on a laptop with an i5 processor and 4GB of RAM

Your issues probably relate to:
• insertion of a TOC via the Gallery;
• an errant third-party addin; and/or
• a faulty Office installation.

Please also don't resurrect old threads; the one to which you replied is nearly two years old.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

The same problem is in Word 2007.

The TOC from gallery is extremely uncomfortable (slow) if somebody wants to use it to quick jump to some part of document (even in very small documents).

As suggested by macropod, the problem is solved when inserting the TOC via one of:

• References|Table of Contents|Insert Table of Contents
  (Note the use of "Insert Table of Contents" not the TOC gallery from this menu!)
• Insert|Quick Parts|Field>TOC

Paul - I think that it's much better resurrect old thread than creating new one for the same subject.

Attached Images

TOC.png (51.8 KB, 15 views)

The same issue applies to a Word versions from 2007 on. It is a consequence of Word using a Building Block to hold the TOC field when inserting one via the Gallery. Word's use of Building Blocks imposes significant performance hits with Citations and Bibliographies, too.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]