Question about Word 2003

[Arkaign]

Hi guys, thanks for taking the time to read this question!

I have a client that has been running Word '03 for quite some time now with no issues whatsoever, though most documents are fairly typical : 1-20mb, mostly text, a few graphs here and there, sometimes a few images, and so on. She is now working on a large business plan document (currently at 107mb), with tons of images, PDF content (she has Acrobat full version), and so on. After a few changes/edits, the program apparently tells her that she is out of memory, and closes itself. She has a C2D-6550 with 2GB DDR2-800, on an Intel P35 chipset, which was a recent upgrade intended to alleviate this problem, as well as increase her performance from her previous system, an Athlon64-3200+ with 1GB DDR1-400. The system is fully updated, XP Pro SP2 OEM, with a clean virus/spyware checkup (Kaspersky/Spybot).

What are my options here? What's causing this? Thanks for any and all suggestions!

 

[InflatableBuddha]

AFAIK, 107Mb is massive for a Word document. I occasionally have stability problems with docs around 5-10Mb. Word simply isn't designed for documents that large. Personally, I use FrameMaker, and have multiple chapters combined into a book.

As far as working with Word though, make sure that styles and fields are being used (i.e. no rogue formatting) and that images are linked to, not embedded. This alone will cut the file size in half, or more.

Another good idea is to break up the document into sections or chapters, and have each one as a separate Word doc. Combine the final document, images and all, into PDF format when it is finalized.

 

[Arkaign]

Thanks so much for your reply, it is a great relief to get some feedback on this. This brings me to a couple of additional questions :

Can she link to .pdf content within the document? How does that save together if she needs to resize an image/pdf within Word? Would Word 2007 fix these issues, or is it basically the same program with a facelift?

 

[InflatableBuddha]

Originally posted by: Arkaign
Thanks so much for your reply, it is a great relief to get some feedback on this. This brings me to a couple of additional questions :

Can she link to .pdf content within the document? How does that save together if she needs to resize an image/pdf within Word? Would Word 2007 fix these issues, or is it basically the same program with a facelift?

You're welcome. If I understand your question correctly, as long as the Word document is structured with headings and an auto-generated TOC, these headings are tagged as bookmarks when the PDF is generated. You can click them in the PDF and they are linked to the appropriate section.

If a source image is modified and the filename is maintained (i.e. saved over), just update all fields in the Word doc and the links are refreshed. If the image is saved with a new filename, delete the link to the previous image and link to the new image. In both cases, regenerate the PDF.

I haven't used Word 2007 so I can't comment on how it handles linking and PDF conversions.

Hope this helps.