L
Loran
Can ayone give me a hands on account of just what the maximum page count is
for Word 2003?
for Word 2003?
S
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Users have reported upwards of 10,000 pages for text-only documents.
J
John McGhie [MVP Word, Word Mac]
Hi Loran:
No
As Suzanne says, you can create a document that will overflow the
"Page Number" counter in Word, which I think goes to 9,999.
But Word does not care how many pages a document prints. Internally, a Word
document does not have any "pages" at all, it's just an endless stream of
text, in no particular order. Word inserts page breaks into the output
stream when it sends the file to the screen or a printer -- it never stores
them in the file.
The "limit" to a document in Word depends on the size of the file in bytes
(in other words, how much information it takes to represent the content of
the document). You can overflow the limits with a ten-page file, or you can
create a 10,000-page file and continue to add material.
The limit YOU will experience varies with operating system, file system, and
hardware resources you have to run Word.
If you store the file on a FAT file system (used only by memory sticks these
days) the total size of the file including graphics cannot exceed 32 MB.
If you store it in FAT 32, the total size of the Text container cannot
exceed 32 MB, and the total size of the file as a whole cannot exceed 2 GB.
If you are running Word 2003, chances are you are running it on Windows XP.
If so, chances are your disk is in NTFS format. If so, the limits are
higher: The maximum size of the Text portion of the file remains 32 MB, but
the combined size of the whole document can easily exceed 4 GB. The actual
upper limit is around 4 TB (4,096 gigabytes).
HOWEVER (here comes the "gotcha"...) you are likely to find that Word is
responding too slowly to be useable well before you hit 2GB in a file! If
you do large documents for a living like I do, you will be running Word on a
dual Zeon workstation with 4 GB or more of RAM.
If you display the document in Print Preview view, and have a picture on
each page, chances are you will find the document too slow to use by the
time you get over 200 pages. In Page Layout View, you will probably find
anything over 1,000 pages a bit frustrating. If you operate in Normal view,
you'll find the document slows down too much to be usable somewhere between
two and five thousand pages.
If you had to buy your own computer and have the kind of machine most normal
folks would have at home, with a single processor and 512 MB or so of RAM,
you will reach about half the above limits before you get sick of waiting.
Then we come to look at the speed of the hard disk! If you are fortunate
enough to have a SATA RAID 0 array spread over four 15,000 rpm physical hard
disks, you will be able to operate reasonably comfortably with a 2 GB file
size. If you are like the rest of us with a single 7,200 RPM Seagate ....
mmmmm! A 2GB file can take 20 minutes to save. Each time! You will not
put up with that for long
You will only be able to find out what that is by trying it. You will
usually find that other considerations such as operational constraints cause
you to split a document into separate files long before you hit Word's or
your computer's performance limits. For example, if you are writing a book,
chances are you will have four to six people on a project to create a
1,000-page book. They will each want full control over their own part while
they are working, so you will split into one file per author immediately.
So there you go: it's one of those questions that does not have a definitive
answer. YOU will have an answer that suits your circumstances.
Hope this helps
--
Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. GMT + 10 Hrs
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]
No
As Suzanne says, you can create a document that will overflow the"Page Number" counter in Word, which I think goes to 9,999.
But Word does not care how many pages a document prints. Internally, a Word
document does not have any "pages" at all, it's just an endless stream of
text, in no particular order. Word inserts page breaks into the output
stream when it sends the file to the screen or a printer -- it never stores
them in the file.
The "limit" to a document in Word depends on the size of the file in bytes
(in other words, how much information it takes to represent the content of
the document). You can overflow the limits with a ten-page file, or you can
create a 10,000-page file and continue to add material.
The limit YOU will experience varies with operating system, file system, and
hardware resources you have to run Word.
If you store the file on a FAT file system (used only by memory sticks these
days) the total size of the file including graphics cannot exceed 32 MB.
If you store it in FAT 32, the total size of the Text container cannot
exceed 32 MB, and the total size of the file as a whole cannot exceed 2 GB.
If you are running Word 2003, chances are you are running it on Windows XP.
If so, chances are your disk is in NTFS format. If so, the limits are
higher: The maximum size of the Text portion of the file remains 32 MB, but
the combined size of the whole document can easily exceed 4 GB. The actual
upper limit is around 4 TB (4,096 gigabytes).
HOWEVER (here comes the "gotcha"...) you are likely to find that Word is
responding too slowly to be useable well before you hit 2GB in a file! If
you do large documents for a living like I do, you will be running Word on a
dual Zeon workstation with 4 GB or more of RAM.
If you display the document in Print Preview view, and have a picture on
each page, chances are you will find the document too slow to use by the
time you get over 200 pages. In Page Layout View, you will probably find
anything over 1,000 pages a bit frustrating. If you operate in Normal view,
you'll find the document slows down too much to be usable somewhere between
two and five thousand pages.
If you had to buy your own computer and have the kind of machine most normal
folks would have at home, with a single processor and 512 MB or so of RAM,
you will reach about half the above limits before you get sick of waiting.
Then we come to look at the speed of the hard disk! If you are fortunate
enough to have a SATA RAID 0 array spread over four 15,000 rpm physical hard
disks, you will be able to operate reasonably comfortably with a 2 GB file
size. If you are like the rest of us with a single 7,200 RPM Seagate ....
mmmmm! A 2GB file can take 20 minutes to save. Each time! You will not
put up with that for long
You will only be able to find out what that is by trying it. You will
usually find that other considerations such as operational constraints cause
you to split a document into separate files long before you hit Word's or
your computer's performance limits. For example, if you are writing a book,
chances are you will have four to six people on a project to create a
1,000-page book. They will each want full control over their own part while
they are working, so you will split into one file per author immediately.
So there you go: it's one of those questions that does not have a definitive
answer. YOU will have an answer that suits your circumstances.
Hope this helps
--
Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. GMT + 10 Hrs
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]