MS Word and large images

[techbeck]

Anyone have any experience in MS Word and attaching images?  Having an annoying problem with a user trying to view a word doc with a lot of uncompressed/resized images.  He is complaining about slow load times, lag, and issues scrolling though the documents.  So he is demanding a new system.  Memory or CPU are not being taxed at all.  I also had him try a different machine with 3x the amount of memory and a dedicated graphics card that is designed to render SolidWorks CAD files.  Nothing significant in the way of better performance.

 

Is MS word designed to handle a bunch of images?  The images are of CAD drawings and are detailed.  I can compress the document and reduce the file size and that does help in loading the document.   But they are to lazy and busy to be bothered with doing more work to reduce the file size.

 

Thanks

[+Zlip792 MVC]

Try these two option:

 

- Tick first one

- Untick second one

 

[techbeck]

Tried hardware acceleration before  but not the other one.  Will try it.

[zhangm Supervisor]

Is MS word designed to handle a bunch of images? The images are of CAD drawings and are detailed. I can compress the document and reduce the file size and that does help in loading the document. But they are to lazy and busy to be bothered with doing more work to reduce the file size.

Having recently experienced similar issues preparing a document, I would say that Word doesn't do a very good job in this aspect.

Word is primarily designed to create, format, and edit documents intended for print. It is not first and foremost intended to display large images that easily exceed the display resolution of typical computer monitors. This is an issue if the user's expected implementation is that they can zoom, with a CSI-like manner, into high resolution images in order to view specific details.

I would have two things to consider if Zlip's suggestions do not work sufficiently well.

1 - If there are specific features of a larger image that the user wishes to present in the document, then they should prepare inset images that show the detail in an appropriately zoomed manner. This requires some work and effort, but it is the sort of thing that would be expected for a professional in the field of publication/printing. You may wish to remind the user if this is part of a job that they're being paid for it (if appropriate - might make them angry though).

2 - Find a different program. Word's limitations are going to be along the lines of "if it's so small after printing that you can't see it, then your image composition is at fault". Since the user has suggested a completely new computer system, I would say that there's a small budget to be had looking into Gigapan-style presentation of these images. I'm not familiar with what programs and scripts are free for use, but having viewed examples of that type of navigation for huge images - I'd say it's worth looking into, especially if you have some $$$ to throw at the problem.

[daorbed9]

If they save the file in PDF you will have a very quick file again.  Word is not meant in any way to manage large uncompressed images.  Just because you can...

[techbeck]

I keep telling them Word is not designed to do so.  But I found out more info....

 

The system they tested that we use for large CAD files and they said didnt help much, well now they are saying it did.  I have it logged that they said that the CAD system didnt make much difference.  So now, to appease them and to shut them up, I am ordering a different graphics card to rule out the onboard graphics issue and going to upgrade the system from 4gb RAM to 8GB.  That shouldnt be to expensive.  The processor is an i5 so I am not worried about that.

 

Also, it appears they are making the changes in a Word doc instead of directly in Adobe Acrobat.  Then converting the doc to a PDF.  They could just do the editing in Abobe and that is why Adobe was purchased. 

[AnotherITguy]

Same deal here, MICROSOFT OFFICE 2013 (OFFICE 365)

 

I just fished editing a 1.12GB word document and word feels slows and sluggish, this can be said also for Onenote with large notebooks. Actually said word document was the content of more than half of a ONENOTE notebook section. I wish MS looked into this.