Word 2007 speed issues

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mk - 21 Dec 2006 05:38 GMT

Hi,
we are automating Word from a VB application using COM. The app is very
basic -- it opens document, prints it to a printer and closes it.
We are trying to switch from Office 2003 to Office 2007. The app works, but
there is a 100% performance degradation (i.e. it takes twice longer to open
the document). Processing time for a simple doc changed from about 2 seconds
to
about 4 seconds on average. When we try to open the document manually we
can see that it does take almost 3 seconds for the document to come up. It
is instanteneous in Office 2003.
Is there any configuration (or anything else) we could try to do to improve
the performance?

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Cindy M. - 25 Dec 2006 11:17 GMT

Hi =?Utf-8?B?bWs=?=,

> we are automating Word from a VB application using COM. The app is very
> basic -- it opens document, prints it to a printer and closes it.
[quoted text clipped - 7 lines]
> Is there any configuration (or anything else) we could try to do to improve
> the performance?

I think the degradation is due primarily to 1) the file formats and 2) building
the new user interface with the Ribbon. Building the Ribbon is somewhat
complicated, as the interface has to check each possible "provider" of
customizations, integrate all of the them, then build the display. It's
painfully slower than the old CommandBars (toolbars) approach was.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 17 2005)
http://www.word.mvps.org

This reply is posted in the Newsgroup; please post any follow question or reply
in the newsgroup and not by e-mail :-)

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Jay Freedman - 25 Dec 2006 15:12 GMT

>Hi =?Utf-8?B?bWs=?=,
>
[quoted text clipped - 23 lines]
>This reply is posted in the Newsgroup; please post any follow question or reply
>in the newsgroup and not by e-mail :-)

With the suspicion that Ribbon construction is the bottleneck, and
since the application doesn't need a Ribbon to operate, it would be
worth turning off the Ribbon to see if the process speeds up. Make a
RibbonX file with startFromScratch = True (see
http://www.pschmid.net/office2007/ribbonx/reference/index.php).

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org

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mk - 26 Dec 2006 06:01 GMT

> >Hi =?Utf-8?B?bWs=?=,
> >
[quoted text clipped - 29 lines]
> RibbonX file with startFromScratch = True (see
> http://www.pschmid.net/office2007/ribbonx/reference/index.php).

Thank you for your reply. I tried to follow the suggetsions from the link
and created the XML file and then added it to a sample docx file archive.
When I open that docx file I still get the same ribbon. Do you know what am
I doing wrong? And also how would I go about configuring ribbon for the old
Office 2003 files, not docx's?
Thanks!

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