[austechwriter] Re: Can anyone help with some numbers?
- From: "HALL Bill" <bill.hall@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 8 Aug 2003 11:24:13 +1000 (EST)
Despite my previous carp against Word,
Before I moved the content into a Front Page environment to facilitate
breaking up the document for easier retrieval in a browser environment,
my hypertext book project was all done in MS Word 97/98 and then 2000
(for a while I was regularly switching the document back and forth
between the different Word versions!).
Other than the usual daily Windows crash because of its lousy resource
management, Word itself has given me no difficulties on this project.
The last version of the main Word document is 150 pages, with 273
separately bookmarked notes in a Notes file, and over 1000 separately
bookmarked citations in a bibliography file. Except for table of content
links, section links are normally (always?) to specific bookmarks.
However the three documents are all extensively internally linked, cross
linked and linked to the Web. The main text file may include as many is
5,000 links and also has a number of graphics and tables.
However, I kept the formatting simple. I have only used font styles for
section and subsection styles. I have turned off every automatic
"feature" I could find. All graphics have been converted to Word's
picture format and inserted in line. I have never ever used any of the
track changes functions on the document. I never do a plain or fast save
- always save as, and I try to do this with a reasonable frequency to
save me from the inevitable Windows crash or freeze when I forget and
leave too many Word, browser and Acrobat screens open (IE's Acrobat
plugin seems to be the source of many problems).
My guess is that Word's problem is not with specific limitations on the
number of links, but rather its inability to keep track of its total
volume of chaotic mess of disparate kinds of information it has to
manage hidden in paragraph marks, section breaks and at the end of the
document (much of which is flushed by doing a save as). If you keep the
other crap to a minimum its link handling technology seems to work fine.
To further insult the system, the files were regularly moved across
computer systems three totally independent working environments with no
apparent hassles: home, Tenix and Monash.
Bill Hall
Documentation Systems Analyst
Head Office, Engineering
Tenix Defense
Williamstown, Vic. 3016
Phone: 03 9244 4820
Email:bill.hall@xxxxxxxxx
URL: http://www.tenix.com
Honorary Research Fellow
Knowledge Management Lab
School of Information Management & Systems
Monash University
Caulfield East, Vic. 3145
Phone: 03 9903 1883
Email: william.hall@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
URL: http://www.sims.monash.edu.au/research/km/
=20
-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Sanders [mailto:psanders@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, 8 August 2003 10:29 AM
To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [austechwriter] Re: Can anyone help with some numbers?
Hi
>I'd appreciate any help I can get to further my argument to break this
file
>down into smaller files.
You can count me twice if you like :-)
No doubt you have heard the phrase "pushing the envelope", well I think
you=20
have burst through it some megabytes ago :-)
After reading the many and varied comments on this list and personal=20
experiences with Word I have to admit that I am impressed that you can
even=20
manage to get this document to function at all :-)
So many cross references AND so many tables AND so many graphics. There
is=20
NO doubt in my mind that you will continue to have difficulties until
you=20
cut this doc into smaller pieces. Even then you could still have
problems.
>I have said that the file has too many cross references. I've been
asked to
>find out how many cross references is too many. While I would rather
ignore
>the question, has anyone any idea if I can find this out?
I doubt that Micro$oft would be able to give you a definitive answer on=20
this. While there may be a "magic number" somewhere, I think that any
such=20
magic limit would be strongly influenced by the other document aspects -
eg=20
your tables/graphics/crossrefs etc.
Regards
Peter.
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