Word 2003 Slow Opening Large File

Make the document smaller.
I guarantee it can be made smaller.
You wouldn't happen to have a place to which you could upload it?

There are no images in it, it is all pages and pages of survey data in tables. Unfortunately, I cant share the data as it is highly confidential data from a large company. I did seem to get it to repaginate MUCH faster now. Once the file is opened it will say like 1/5 pages then repaginate as you scroll through it. To make it go MUCH faster, when the document opens, hit Ctrl-End, the pagination now takes about 2 minutes which is quite livable. Once that completes the document is cached and Word performans nicely.

Okay. So did you save as RTF?

There is NO reason for this file to be 65MB.
Tables or not.

Try the RTF thing.

Wow. I'd like to see Dale's Note1 and Note2

Wait is this over the wire (network share) or local hard drive?

I want to see those notes too. And this is after it is copied to the local drive, I am not THAT sadistic.

ROFL, Kerry!

(Kerry? Did you save as RTF yet? I know it'll take a bit, but sometimes...hey, I've seen docs decrease TENfold...)

Tried to save it as RTF and 5 minutes later it has shown zero progress on the save.

Not gonna happen, 10 minutes and Word is dead trying to save as RTF. I thought for a second about saving it as HTML but I have seen Explorer crash on a lot less than 1000 pages.

As for the size, this is an intense document, 1,000 pages of landscape tables all in tiny font sizes. There are 2.5 million characters. Its the table data that is pushing it off the scale, not "words".

Thanks for the tips, but the Ctrl-End to force pagination seems to be making everyone happy right now. On my 3.2ghz desktop, it finishes in under a minute.

What size does the file become when you winzip, kerry?

Original: 63.1mb
PowerArchiver Zip: 4.54mb

Okay.
Then there's definitely bloating that'll be gotten rid of....
You realize that saving as RTF doesn't lose anything, dontcha?
I mean...you're making a copy, not wrecking your original.
AND, it doesn't lose your formatting.

But....it hangs Word trying to save it.

Right. Duh.
I don't suppose you could send it to me? See my profile.

Not if I wanted to keep this client. Wish I could, but the company that creates the file (a large in-car communications company that is carried by a major car company) auto-creates this file for my client (a large company that analyzes all the data from their client) and both companies would have my hide if I let anyone see the data.

Or...
Delete the last 500 pages, save as RTF.
Reopen DOC, delete first 500 pages....
you see...

500 Pages in RTF format = 59.9mb

I told you this document was brutal.

There's got to be something else wrong.
If you haven't given up or given up on me yet...maybe....

Could you take like 2 pages of it, save to a new doc.
Do a find and replace on miscellaneous and random letters/numbers so it becomes illegible text/data.
And upload that??

Oh. Sorry. I keep spamming you, I know.

Open that 500 pages and SAVE AS A DOC.
What's the size now?

I didn't want the RTF size.

maybe you could try to open in open office and save again?

source : http://download.openoffice.org/index.html

it could do wonders :-)

After loading the RTF (500 pages) and saving as a Doc, the new size is 46.5mb. I looked at the data and it would take all day to obfiscate the data enough, sorry.

open office opens even corrupt word documents and saves them as word again

but it could be dumb suggestion since Dreamboat is rolling over this one already ;-)

No suggestions are dumb, Bru. :)

I just created a file with 8 million + characters.
10.5 MB

Something dreadfully wrong there.

I have tried all of the suggestions and I really appreciate the effort. However, there are no images, autotext, or anything abnormal. It is simple one massive table structure after another. It is all done in 6 and 8 pt font sizes so the amount of text is double what you would normally get per page, add in the table definitions and headers and it just keeps adding up to a massive file regardless of what we have tried.

What size is it if you bring it down to text?

Saved as plain text the file is 2.28mb. Unfortunatley, it is completely unusable in that format because it blows out all of the table layout so you cant match up the data in it.

Kerry, maybe you need to take this a step further.
I have a fax machine, to which a non-disclosure agreement can be sent.
And then you can send the file.
I feel confident we can fix this thing.

I have asked my client amd they said no on letting anyone else see the file. Here is a rundown:

1. The file is automatically generated every week from one company and sent to my client
 - Thus any fix to the current file is moot when the next file arrives

2. The file seems to be almost double the file limitation of Word
 - This causes Word to behave quite poorly

3. Forcing a repagination by hitting Ctrl-End speeds up the load time from 20 minutes to 2
 - So while it is a small pain, the file is now quite workable

As I don't think there is any permanent fix due to #1, I am going to split points up based on your effort to assist.

Thanks, Kerry.
Please advise the client that the point isn't moot if we could perhaps create a macro or something that will automatically *fix* the file each week. You could also advise them that I have had clients such as MSDW, JPMorgan, and GS, to name just a few. Also, if you do a search on my username, you'll notice I have a bit of a reputation to uphold and wouldn't jeopardize it for a bit of data. :) I have over 27,000 tech support posts on the web.
Anyway, I do understand YOUR position, and am only sorry. This must frustrate heck out of you.

It sure does, but since their big complaint was taking 20 minutes to load the file and telling them to hit Ctrl-End and having it only take 2 minutes, they are happy for the time being. My personal guess is that this is going to require the work to get it solved at some point as this data set is growing each week and its only a matter of time before my simple work-around stops working.

Well, if someone always wants to open the file in normal view, you can do that, but ... yuk. I hate normal view myself.

http://www.vbaexpress.com/kb/getarticle.php?kb_id=65