07-15-2013, 08:16 PM

Hi I am using MS Office WORD with EndNote on an MBA 11" mid 2011 (4,1) with an LED Cinema display.
However, my question is about WORD with long docs. The program seems to slow down. I'm at about 90 pages + 10 pages of references and some WORD endnotes.

What will get me back up to speed? I really don't want to break it up into a master doc and chapters, because I have heard horror stories about that.

Is there any other way I can speed things up?

Thanks,

Steve

07-15-2013, 08:27 PM

Very long documents in Word are going to be directly impacted by two things:

1. The amount of memory that your MBA has and..

2. Remaining free space on the SSD.

Just for info sake, MS Word for the Mac either 2008 or 2011 versions are not well suited for long documents. Unfortunately, the Windows version does much better in that regard.

For the kind of document you're working on I highly recommend Scrivener for the Mac instead. You can preview it by going to the Mac App Store.

And to answer your question, other than what I replied above I don't know of a way to speed things up in Mac Word.

07-15-2013, 08:58 PM

Originally Posted by chscag

Very long documents in Word are going to be directly impacted by two things:

1. The amount of memory that your MBA has and..

2. Remaining free space on the SSD.

Just for info sake, MS Word for the Mac either 2008 or 2011 versions are not well suited for long documents. Unfortunately, the Windows version does much better in that regard.

For the kind of document you're working on I highly recommend Scrivener for the Mac instead. You can preview it by going to the Mac App Store.

And to answer your question, other than what I replied above I don't know of a way to speed things up in Mac Word.

chscag,

Hi. Thanks for your helpful reply.

I have 115 GB free, and with 4 G of memory, there always seems to be enough. I guess shutting of all other programs might help a bit. I'm already into working with an editor and changing processors might be a lot of trouble. do you know if Scrivener for Mac imports complicated docs like this ok (no styles, so maybe it's not too complicated, except for the EndNote.

07-15-2013, 09:15 PM

Hi:

I can understand not wanting to change horses in the middle of the stream... However, Scrivener is fully compatible with Word and should have no problem importing your document. But since you're well into the document, I do not recommend switching now. Just for future reference, that's what I would use.

I do a lot of work with Word but my docs are rather short compared to yours and I have 8 GB of memory to work with. My Windows version (Word 2010) is not only much faster but it can easily handle very large complex documents whereas the Mac version seems to choke on those.

Sorry I can't be of more help.

07-15-2013, 09:24 PM

chscag,

Hey, it's going smoother now, I shut down everything else but t versions. Maybe it's because I'm a slow writer! Thanks again. Steve