How many pages are too many?

September 8, 2005 1:46 PM

How many pages are too many in a word-processing document?

I'm working on a document in Word that'll be about 200 pages when it's done. Is it OK to leave it as one document, or do I run the risk of problems with something that large? I can break it up into smaller documents, but it's much more useful to me as one document.

posted by showmethecalvino to computers & internet (15 comments total)

200 pages is no problem. Many legal documents run in the 1,000+ page mark and are fine. However, if you're inserting lots of images you may want to think about splitting it up. If it's just text I don't see why it would be a problem.
posted by MeetMegan at 1:49 PM on September 8, 2005

Be careful what you do while you're working on a document that big. Normal editing should be no problem, but if you start doing things like using revision marks and running a lot of find-and-replace commands, you might start to bog down or crash.
posted by pracowity at 2:01 PM on September 8, 2005

For work investments that are at least that large, I like to use a version control system combined with a plain-text word processing language like LaTeX. That way changes can be undone independently of all other edits. The printed result is always superior, and export to PDF works perfectly.

TeX/LaTeX syntax is not for everyone. But if you regularly have to compose long documents, I'd consider it seriously.
posted by clord at 2:21 PM on September 8, 2005

I find that MS word starts to choke with 200 page documents, particularly if they have complex formatting (footnotes, endnotes, pictures). You can always try to see if it works, and if necessary, change them to use the master document /subdocuments features (info in word help files).
posted by jasper411 at 2:23 PM on September 8, 2005

Most legal offices choose wordperfect because word can start to have terrible problems with as few as 50 pages (for complex documents). Usually they are related to memory leaks and crash the word processor, or, when you are lucky, it simply slows down to unusability. Wordperfect, especially version 5.1/DOS, seems to have most of these horrible bugs beat out of it. I'm sure there's other wordprocessors that are also decent for long documents. I just know word isn't one of them.

You're best bet with word is to keep it under 50 pages, at least from my experience.
posted by shepd at 2:26 PM on September 8, 2005

Shepd - interesting take - I haven't heard that at all. In fact, every one of the AmLaw 200 firms uses Word. I am a lawyer, and my firm uses Word without issue (except with the image problems I mentioned above).

Perhaps small firms prefer WordPerfect. Word's many bugs have been worked out by the 2000 version and better. Sorry for the derail. ;)
posted by MeetMegan at 2:31 PM on September 8, 2005

What you want to do is create a master document (search on that in Word help) with chapters as subdocuments. You get one TOC, outline and index, but escape the issues of one gigantic doc.
posted by garbo at 2:36 PM on September 8, 2005

Law firms *used* to use WordPerfect, almost down to the last one. WordPerfect knocked the socks off of Word. But all/many of the clients of those firms used Word, and law firms gradually switched over for compatibility reasons. *shakes fist in the general direction of Redmond, WA*

If I were you, I would break it up into smaller sections while you are working on it, and then if you really need it as one document, combine them into one after you have finished.
(what garbo said.)

And please, please, please tell us that you are backing up your work to an external hard drive...
posted by ambrosia at 2:56 PM on September 8, 2005

It seems as though the master document is considered harmful by some experts.

Instability in Word documents is usually caused by improper formatting; manual carriage returns and page breaks, hitting tab to indent, that sort of thing. You can increase stability and decrease file size by using custom paragrah, character and list styles. A 200 page document should be fine as long as you create it properly.
posted by philscience at 2:59 PM on September 8, 2005

After doing one 200 page thesis in one 200 page Word chunk, I took the advice in this AskMe thread to do the next one using a Master Document.

Though the first one went okay, the second one was soooo much easier to deal with, open, edit, email around for suggestions, etc. Since the master document is really one document, in the end, this gave me the benefits of both the single and multi-document processes.

Here's the Microsoft support document on making long documents in Word.
posted by whatzit at 3:26 PM on September 8, 2005

philscience is absolutely correct - and I'll go him one further: Create a new template, with all new styles - when you create your styles, do NOT base them on the "Normal" style (there is an opportunity to base them on "no style") - the Normal style (along with manual page breaks, empty paragraph markers, and section breaks) seem to become corrupted quite easily. Use your style attributes to control spacing, page breaks, tabs, bullets, etc. When you are desperate, you can add a page break (Word 2003) by going to the Format menu, selecting Paragraph, and selecting the Page break before checkbox. This will not 'break' your style, nor does it add a "manual" page break - however, if you edit later, you may end up with some weird page breaks (until you remember this attribute).
We use a custom template (made by yours truly) on documents of up to 1200 pages, with multiple TOCs (contents, figures, tables), footnotes, tables, and diagrams/pictures - they are extremely stable.
Regarding Word's so-called Master Documents "feature" (it's not a bug, it's a feature looking for a benefit), to quote the Word MVP site - "A master document only has two states - corrupt, or about to become corrupt." Avoid this at all costs.
posted by dbmcd at 3:27 PM on September 8, 2005

I worked in a place that had 300+-page Word manuals with lots of graphics. They were a nightmare. Word would change fonts or other formatting in parts I wasn't even working on. I wouldn't know it until I printed the doc out.

I have heard numerous horror stories about Master Document. If you're going to try it, do it on a copy of your document, and thoroughly check the result.

The real problem with Word is that MS tries to include every conceivable feature in it. Not all the features are fully-implemented, and some do not work well with each other. No one uses all of those features, but you can't disable the ones you don't want.

I very strongly suggest finding an alternative word processor. Some people recommend Open Office. I do not know if it's immune to the long-doc problems that Word has, but it's free, and much smaller than Word.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 3:44 PM on September 8, 2005

I second the TeX/LaTeX suggestion.

I also will go one step farther and recommend LyX, which is a graphical frontend to TeX or LaTeX. It may be too late to change (plus I don't know if it works on Windows or Mac, as I am using linux) for this document, but if you do another book-sized document, I would go with LyX.
posted by achmorrison at 4:05 PM on September 8, 2005

For years, I worked almost exclusively in LaTeX (including for mundane things such as letters and memos), but switched to Word for collegial compatibility reasons.

LaTeX is fantastic for huge documents and handles tables and graphs in a way far superior to Word. There is a very big learning curve to learning how to make LaTeX documents look the way you want them to look.

Even (especially?) on a Mac, Word starts to behave very oddly if it decides your document is too big.

If you have large (or even medium sized) document DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES USE "TRACK CHANGES." I can almost guarantee that bad things will happen.
posted by GarageWine at 4:33 PM on September 8, 2005

I second the LaTeX + LyX suggestion. I think you can get a windows copy of LyX.
posted by polyglot at 10:20 PM on September 8, 2005