Spelling and Grammar Status - Advice needed

[xppuser]

hi all,

wxp pro sp2, office 2003 sp2, pentium 1.73 Ghz, 512 Mb DDR-Ram,

not quite sure whether this is a machine specific issue, Word or me not
doing things right.

i am preparing a large document. at the moment it is approaching 500 pages
long, lots of texts, tables and figures (no colors, just b&w). lately,
whenever i cut and paste texts/tables from other documents/excels it can be
anywhere between few seconds to nearly 10 minutes before i can do anything to
the pasted e.g. tables. some things that i noticed:

pasted table appeared a few rows at a time, the columns appeared zig-zag,
and the spelling and grammar status were busy scribing (you know the icon at
the bottom of Word 2003, next to language box). the table appeared settled
only when the spelling and grammar status completed it 'scribbling' and this
can take anywhere between a few seconds to, on an occasion, just under 10
minutes.

what i have tried was to cut and paste to a blank document, finalize it
(i.e. fixed the style, formatting, spellings etc). then copy paste into the
document that i am preparing. however this does not appear to solve the
problem (if it is a problem). the spelling and grammar status keep doing its
'scribbling' while i am forced to wait.

not only that, twice now, whenever i alt-tab to something else and then
alt-tab back to word, word shuts down. i have to Start -> Word to launch Word
and recover my document. this is a rather worrying situation to me. on both
occasions though i did not loose any work and i do have back-ups of the
documents i am at a lost to explain this behaviour of word.

any help, advice, or work-arounds is appreciated. in particular i am
thinking about splitting the work but i do not know whether that is advisable
and what would happen to all the captioning and cross-referencing of all the
tables and figures that i have undertaken.

regards,
jes

 

[aneasiertomorrow]

Hi Jes

As a quick fix have you tried open and repair? I find it helps stabalise
douments. For a longer term fix, maybe you should consider using
master/subdocuments.

Lucy

 

[xppuser]

hi lucy,

thanks for your reply.

i have just tried open and repair the file - it is unfortunately still oh so
slow :-(. it is quite heartbreaking at the moment. it all seems to have gone
smoothly following many of the friendly Word MVP's advice over here.

i have set Headings, use Captios (Tables, Figures) and Section breaks. it
looked good but now seemingly out of the blue (though after googling
master/subdocuments i realised it was not) things are just slowing right down
and becoming (i found out the jargon) 'unstable'.

i am really paranoid now. i do have back-ups but what good would an unstable
back-up be :-(? there is only maybe two-three more weeks worth of writing and
the document is heading for just under/over 1000 pages long.

what i am going to do is to create another document hereinafter (just after
passing page 500) trying to maintain the consistency of
(Formatting/Styles/Captioning etc.) and hopefully when i copy/paste the
latter into the first at the end, there would not be any glitch!

i realised after googling master/subdocument that this was the route that i
should have taken at the beginning but as this is my first large document
(none of my previous documents did not exceed 250 pages), i was none the
wiser but at least i learnt plenty and hopefully it won't be too much of an
additional hard work or disaster.

do you have any (other) suggestions/advice? would appreciate them.

regards,
jes

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

When you were googling about master documents, did you perhaps run across
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/WhyMasterDocsCorrupt.htm?

 

[xppuser]

hi again suzanne,

no, google did not googled that one but i am downright confused and really
worried now after reading your link. when googled earlier some of the link
did hint that master/subdocuments may not be ideal but in a large document,
this method could be a life-safer not a 'soul-destroying', which seemed
implied by John McGhie's article.

i am confused and really worried now because:

1. although i have not set out knowing master/subdocument what i have done
(as a rank amateur or at most pro-am user of word 2003) is in effect creating
something akin to master/subdocument. in between the chapters i've used
section break next page and even within each chapter i have contained the
figures and tables within a section break (next page). so there are lots of
section breaks, when perhaps i should be using page break? however it does
not rest easy where the tables needed to be in landscape mode.

2. right now, following the onset of the instability, i have continued
working but using a separate document to do the editing (i.e. table
formatting, borders etc) and then copy/paste to the main (the unstable long
one), adding only the Sytle/Formatting & Captions over there (in the unstable
long document). so far the instability hasn't reared its ugly head again and
the long wait following copy/paste tables did not happen. so i surmised my
belt/braces approach seems to hold for now. would you have another
suggestion(s) on how to tackle this?

3. i realised that i may be in a 'fighting fire' situation rather than
preventing it in the first place, salvaging what i can and hoping to hobble
along with nothing bad happening in the next 6 - 8 weeks (including
revisions). should i be doing something different at this stage? the only
thing substantial (i think they are substantial in my opinion) remain to be
done are TOC, TOT, TOF and Index generation but these are some 3 weeks away.
generation of these things are what i am really worried about now following
the appearance of recent instability of the document. the dire warning given
in John MeGhie's article is never far from my mind hence the multiple
back-ups including daily incremental ones right from day one but like i
mentioned before what good would these back-ups do if they are all unstable?
again, suggestions/advice would be appreciated.

in fact thinking about contigency, i suppose i could make the document into
2 - 3 parts but then what do i do then? i.e. should each volume has its own
TOC/TOT/TOF and Index then it would not look as good compared to the document
in whole. perhaps i am being too pessimistic but time will tell.

my apology if i seem to be too verbose but best if i wrote my train of
thoughts, which i hope would help others to help me with advice/guidance/tips.

thanks again,
jes

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

A properly constructed document of this length, even with numerous section
breaks, should not cause problems. Provided you have used styles properly,
you should be able to carry on in a single document.

 

[xppuser]

thanks for your encouraging words suzanne. woud you have a link to show an
example (or two) what would constitute "A properly constructed document"? may
not be useful now but, heaven forbid, should i have to do another one, i
would be minded to do it as right as possible.

regards,
jes

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

You might have a look at
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customization/CreateATemplatePart2.htm for good
advice.

 

[xppuser]

thanks suzanne for the pointer to john mc ghie's article.

regards,
jez