Word XP goes slow in tables

[Adam Leinss]

Hi guys. Got a weird issue here. I have a user that has tables in
Word documents. These tables are NOT linked to external data sources.
What happens is that when she types in a word into a cell and then hits
tab to go to the next screen Word goes so slow that it take around 10
seconds for it to go to the next cell! If she tries to highlight a
whole column it takes at least 15 seconds. This is in a brand new
document in a table with 5 columns and 300 rows (all cells are empty).
I deleted her local and roaming Windows NT profile: no change. Since
this is an offsite clinic I brought along a network guy: says bandwidth
at site is fine and there are no issues. I have her try to log into
another PC and she gets same issue with the tables. I decide to image
a new, faster box even though what she is using is pretty fast. Same
issue!

I take the documents that are on her group drive and copy them to her
local C: drive. Same issue! I have her send me the documents back to
the main site: I cannot reproduce issue on my machine! I remote
control her PC and login as myself and another test user: I cannot
reproduce the issue! Her new PC is a 2.8 GHz HT Pentium 4 with 512 MB
of RAM and a 60 GB SATA hard drive. I'm absolutely at a lost why Word
is acting so pokey in these tables. It's like the computer is working
overtime to the point that the mouse cursor disappears for 5 seconds
and then reappears! Antivirus is up-to-date, image is working fine on
700+ PCs. The network guy and I are going back next week and he is
going to try a data capture when the problem is happening, but does
anyone have any bright ideas that would restore my sanity? Here are
the specs of the new PC (which still has the same problem as the old
PC, which I think was a 2.4 GHZ with 256 MB of RAM):

2.8 HT Pentium 4
512 MB of RAM
60 GB SATA hard drive
Windows 2000 SP4
Office XP SP3 (I upgraded it from SP2 to see if that helped: no change)
Event log doesn't show anything of interest

Thanks,
Adam

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

That's a lot of rows (even empty). In fact, I'm not sure I see the point of
creating so many *empty* rows considering that Word gives you a new row
whenever you tab out of the last one. But Word doesn't like long tables and
is much more efficient if you split the table up (temporarily) while working
on it. See also http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/TblsFldsFms/FastTables.htm

 

[Adam Leinss]

That's a lot of rows (even empty). In fact, I'm not sure I see the
point of creating so many *empty* rows considering that Word gives
you a new row whenever you tab out of the last one. But Word
doesn't like long tables and is much more efficient if you split
the table up (temporarily) while working on it. See also
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/TblsFldsFms/FastTables.htm

Hi Suzanne.

We got it narrowed down to it being the network drive. Ever time we
made a modification in the file it would go back and re-read the file
from the network. Since the network at the offsite clinic is a bit
slow the actions kept queuing waiting for the network to catch up.
We set the following key at the web site below to 1 MB:

http://www.winguides.com/registry/display.php/1233/

Thanks,
Adam

 

[TF]

Adam

I'm not sure if this was introduced in Office XP or Office 2003, but in 2003
under Tools, Options, Save Tab there is a setting for 'Make local copy of
files stored on network or removable drives,' which should also help resolve
your problem.



: :
: > That's a lot of rows (even empty). In fact, I'm not sure I see the
: > point of creating so many *empty* rows considering that Word gives
: > you a new row whenever you tab out of the last one. But Word
: > doesn't like long tables and is much more efficient if you split
: > the table up (temporarily) while working on it. See also
: > http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/TblsFldsFms/FastTables.htm
: >
:
: Hi Suzanne.
:
: We got it narrowed down to it being the network drive. Ever time we
: made a modification in the file it would go back and re-read the file
: from the network. Since the network at the offsite clinic is a bit
: slow the actions kept queuing waiting for the network to catch up.
: We set the following key at the web site below to 1 MB:
:
: http://www.winguides.com/registry/display.php/1233/
:
: Thanks,
: Adam