Special Edition Using Microsoft® Office XP

Keeping Long Documents Under Control

Effectively using Word to handle long documents—100 pages or more—requires a great deal of forethought and planning. After document file sizes exceed a megabyte or two, they become unwieldy, slow to load, and susceptible to corruption.

One File or Many?

There's no easy cure for long documents. Adding more RAM usually helps improve Word's response time on large and small documents, and Windows NT, 2000, or XP definitely provides a more stable environment than Windows 95, 98 or Me. But at some point, generally in the vicinity of 1MB–5MB file sizes, any PC will have trouble handling a big Word document.

As your documents get larger, you have three choices:

• Continue to work with a single large file— If you should ...