Re: HELP! A monumental pickle

[Bill Swallow <techcommdood -at- gmail -dot- com>]

I'm trying this reply again... having major issues with posting to the
list lately...

800-1000 pages is a bit much for Word to handle. If you don't have the
luxury of pulling content into another application such as OpenOffice
or FrameMaker, here's what I suggest:

1) Work with the smaller files first, selecting blocks of text and
applying consistent styles to them (use the same styles in all
documents). Try to get the paragraph formats down to no more than 10
if possible. The more Word needs to track in a large document, the
more room for error there is.

2) Create a new blank document and copy/paste content into it,
omitting the last paragraph marker in each file in the copy/paste. I
forget the exact reason why (it's been about 10 years since I've used
Word for any real tech writing) but you're less likely to foul your
document up this way.

3) Explain the condition of the files to those who are asking for the
document. Explain you are going to try to get them a working document
as soon as possible, but also let them know the general nature of the
issues. Make sure they understand that the copies in Yahoo are
near-corrupt and are crashing Word when they are pulled together.

4) Calm down. It's a state gig. ;-)


--
Bill Swallow
HATT List Owner
WWP-Users List Owner
42.8162,-73.7736
http://techcommdood.blogspot.com
============================
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