Hi friends!



After falling asleep at the keyboard repeatedly while waiting for Word to do its thing, I broke the ~700-page doc into small chapters and now everything is lightning fast.

I am sending the separate chapters out to proofreaders and editors, and in the interim wna to prepare for putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. And still retain fast speed.

My file health is as follows:

1. Almost all repetitive graphics (mostly small operators)via cross-referenced bookmarks.

2, Have over a hundred section breaks.

3. All formatting via styles.

4. Many, many cross-references and bookmarks. Many long footnotes

I have experimented. with different tweaks and some have helped a little here and a little there, but nothing has made any real substantial difference.

I want to invest in a faster SSD hard drive. that runs at two times the speed.
Will this actually have any effect on Word?? or am I wasting my money?

What is most important, that the office app is reinstalled on the fast drive or the doc itself is sufficient?

Would investing in a higher-end graphics accelerator also have any bearing?

Any and all input is appreciated.

Thank you and have a good day!

Susan Flamingo

In my opinion you would be wasting your money unless your current machine is over 4 or 5 years old and seriously underpowered.

Your document structure is most likely why things are slow.
If you have over 100 section breaks you are asking Word to do far more work than should be necessary.
We've talked many times about footnotes and it sounds like you've stuck with putting large amounts of content into footnotes despite advice suggesting that life would be easier if you put that content into the body of the document.
The number of cross-refs are unlikely to be the reason things are slow apart from when you are updating those fields. Depending on your optional settings, fields could be updating when you open or print. However, if you have fields in your 100+ headers/footers then this could be a big drain on speed because repagination might be continuously asking these fields to update.

To test whether the speed problems you are having are really related to your hardware, make a copy of your complete 700 page doc and do these things to it.
1. Remove all Section breaks with a find and replace.
2. Convert footnotes to Endnotes
Now, try working with that file for a while and pay attention to the speed. Does it appear to work at an acceptable speed? If so, a hardware change is unlikely to fix your issues. However, if it is still slow, try locking all fields in the document - does the speed now increase? If not, try editing the doc in Draft view - how is the speed now?

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

I agree with everything Andrew has said. From a personal perspective, when I changed from having Office and my documents on a (relatively fast) HDD to an SSD, the speed and responsiveness change was quite noticeable.
I still store the bulk of my documents on the HDD drive though. I do not know that a faster SSD would be noticeable, at all.

That is a tremendous number of section breaks. I am not saying you do not need them, only that I suspect that may be the primary problem.
When to use Section breaks in Microsoft Word (and when to not use Section Breaks)
Section breaks carry a tremendous amount of formatting information. You can reduce slow-down from them, as Andrew suggested, by working in draft view.