Help !!! Is word too small for my document???

[lou]

I recently volunteered to help on a community project to publish a history of our community, we chose MS Word 2002 to write it in. The book contains about 400 pages. It consists of a Master document and 30 sub-documents of which one is a table of contents and one is an index. We are compiling this "document" on my computer which is a Pentium 4 (3.06 gig) system with 2 gig of memory, 78 gig of free disk space on the F: disk where the document file is located, and 5.78 gig of free disk space on the C: drive where the temp file is located. My OS is Windows XP pro and I use MS Office XP pro. All the techie stuff out of the way to the problem. Everything was going well until we started adding pictures to the "document" (some .png, .wmf and .jpg). The document has grown to about 1.47 gig and now when we try to compile the TOC from the master doc and we respond "yes" to the query "Do you want open the subdcuments before continuing with this command?" it occassional gives us an error that a subdocument is missing and indicates that all subsequent subdocument in the master doc are likewise missing, it also sometimes gives an error that a "Word failed reading from this file (<filename>). Please restore the network connection or replace the floppy disk and retry" . . . the file named is neither on the network nor on floppy disk. Could it be that the 1.47 gig "document" is too big for MS Word to handle. Any body have any advise ???? When the problems occured I sent an error report to Microsoft but we know that usually goes into a black hole or at least I'll never receive a response. I 've downloaded all the patches and I'm at a loss.

 

[Greg Maxey]

Lou,

Avoid Master Documents. See:

http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/RecoverMasterDocs.htm


A number of limits may affect your document. I can't think of a reason why
400 pages would. If you look up "Limits for Word" in Word help you should
find a list of such stuff.

 

[Charles Kenyon]

Answered at length in response to duplicate post in docmanagement. This post
also given in response to your other duplicate post in application.errors.

Short story - you've found out why people advise others to not use Master
Documents.

In the Microsoft Word newsgroups it is considered bad form to post separate
messages to multiple newsgroups. If you need to post in more than one forum
(unusual) please post a single message with both forums in the header of
that single message. That way (1) your question and the various answers stay
together, (2) less space is used on the news servers, (3) less bandwidth is
used on the Internet, (4) you only have to check one forum for answers that
appear in both forums, and (5) you won't unnecessarily annoy the people you
are asking for help. This isn't meant to criticize you. We were all
beginners once and the only way to learn is to try. (BTW, a number of the
Microsoft newsgroups don't want posting in more than one newsgroup, period.
Check the FAQ.)
Take a look on the MVP FAQ website under "getting help" for more reasons ase
well as other suggestions for getting answers more easily and quickly. <URL:
http://www.mvps.org/word/FindHelp/Posting.htm>

I recently volunteered to help on a community project to publish a history

of our community, we chose MS Word 2002 to write it in. The book contains
about 400 pages. It consists of a Master document and 30 sub-documents of
which one is a table of contents and one is an index. We are compiling
this "document" on my computer which is a Pentium 4 (3.06 gig) system with 2
gig of memory, 78 gig of free disk space on the F: disk where the document
file is located, and 5.78 gig of free disk space on the C: drive where the
temp file is located. My OS is Windows XP pro and I use MS Office XP pro.
All the techie stuff out of the way to the problem. Everything was going
well until we started adding pictures to the "document" (some .png, .wmf and
..jpg). The document has grown to about 1.47 gig and now when we try to
compile the TOC from the master doc and we respond "yes" to the query "Do
you want open the subdcuments before continuing with this command?" it
occassional gives us an error that a subdocument is missing and indicates
that all subsequent subdocument in the master doc are likewise missing, it
also sometimes gives an error that a "Word failed reading from this file
(<filename>). Please restore the network connection or replace the floppy
disk and retry" . . . the file named is neither on the network nor on
floppy disk. Could it be that the 1.47 gig "document" is too big for MS
Word to handle. Any body have any advise ???? When the problems occured I
sent an error report to Microsoft but we know that usually goes into a black
hole or at least I'll never receive a response. I 've downloaded all the
patches and I'm at a loss.