Mac Forum / Applications / Word / May 2008

I just found this discussion in another section of this forum.

<http://www.officeformac.com/ProductForums/Word/1240/0>

It might help

Hello Antoine and [whoever],

There are various possibilities for your problem but I don't think we are
likely to track down the specifics easily.

If only one file is involved (i.e., you won't be having this problem
repeatedly with successive files), and if the solution you mentioned "only
works temporarily" (i.e., you can actually open the file) I would recommend
that you copy, say, a third of the file then open a new blank document and
choose Edit menu => Paste Special => Unformatted text (in Word 2008 it may
be different; I'm in Word 2004). Repeat for the other two-thirds of the
document.

Then, in the new document, re-apply the formatting (if you can print the 5.3
MB file that would be useful). You will be far better off applying the
formatting via styles rather than directly*. For example, you would apply
Heading 1 to the first chapter heading, then look for the second chapter
heading, drop the insertion point anywhere in it and key Command-y. I have
re-formatted 200-page documents with frequent headings this way in well
under 30 minutes.

Your new document will be far more compact. If it's a very long document and
over say 2 MB, you can always split it and re-join at the last moment, of
course.

* For the many reasons, see pages 91-93 of some notes on the way I use Word
for the Mac, titled "Bend Word to Your Will", which are available as a free
download from the Word MVPs' website
(http://word.mvps.org/Mac/Bend/BendWordToYourWill.html).

Cheers,

Clive Huggan
Canberra, Australia
(My time zone is 5-11 hours different from the Americas and Europe, so my
follow-on responses to those regions can be delayed)
====================================================

On 4/5/08 6:20 AM, in article ee9a716.0@webcrossing.caR9absDaxw,

Hi Antoine:

On 4/05/08 5:50 AM, in article ee9a716.0@webcrossing.caR9absDaxw,

The "others" are correct.  There are a lot of myths and rumours running
around about the memory demands of modern software.

Office 2008 requires a gig of memory to run.  It will survive down to about
256 MB, but it will get very, very slow.  To run "well" on big documents,
you will find 2 GB of memory well worth the investment, particularly on a
PowerPC, where the code expands in memory to be twice the size of Intel
code.

However, the amount of memory Word actually "needs" is not particularly
related to document size.  Word tries to be economical with memory, and will
use only what it needs.  However, if the system has plenty of memory to
spare, Word will use a bit of it to speed things up.  It doesn't have to
have it, but it will run a lot faster if it's available.

I can understand why a page designer might think Word is using too much
memory, given that they often load up 2,000 fonts (at half a megabyte
each!!) and then wonder where all their memory went :-)  I have 201 fonts on
the system :-)

Sitting here doing nothing much while I am answering questions, Word 2008 is
sitting on about 77 MB of real memory.  It has reserved another 650 MB or so
of disk space in case it needs to page stuff in or out, but it's not
actually using it.  So it's a chunky little application, but it's using less
than Safari, by quite a bit.

If I open a few large and complex documents and start working vigorously on
them, Word will suck a lot more memory if it's free, or get quite slow if
it's not.  Since I prefer to get my work done quickly, I am prepared to
shell out for the memory that takes.

Hope this helps