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Subject:Re: Working with large documents in Word From:"Gene Kim-Eng" <techwr -at- genek -dot- com> To:"Raj Machhan" <raj -dot- machhan -at- gmail -dot- com>, "techwr-l" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Thu, 9 Aug 2007 08:45:16 -0700
There's no big trick to creating large documents in Word.
Most of the things you have to watch out for are the same
things that cause headaches in small documents, such as
templates magically updating themselves if you paste in
content from other Word docs, the proliferation of rogue
"styles" when you manually format, etc. And Word's
master document function is especially unforgiving of
inconsistent document configuration. Break the doc
into smaller files so that when life happens (system
crash, network crash, file corruption, etc.) the potential
damage is limited.
A bigger issue is why an 800 page document? I have
never - and I mean *never* - seen a document with more
than 200 pages that would not have been easier to read
and use if it had been broken into smaller volumes. And
I have seen potential customers of products and systems
decide not to buy because they saw a massive tome for
a user manual and concluded that anything that required
a manuial that big must be overly complex. Whose idea
was the 800 page document?
> I am presently working on a large document, already 800 pages and more to
> come, using MS Word. The application, however, is getting quirkier by the
> hour as I add new content. Has anyone been through this? It would be a big
> help if you could share your experience.
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