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MS Office Forum / Word / Programming / February 2005Word Automation Speed Slow
I took a look at this ng's FAQs and could only locate one article (by Daryl Lucas) with some pointers regarding speeding up Word Automation from VB6. These were fairly limited in scope...can anyone point me to some more detailed discussions on how to speed up Word Automation? Seems like it's really slow from the testing I've done so far (creating tables in code seems to be the worst). Dan Perhaps you could explain a little more of the issues you're dealing with? Word automation isn't normally very slow unless you're doing silly things like working intensively with the Selection object, using the Windows and Panes objects, and forcing Word to repaginate continually. Some basic tips -- - Work exclusively with Range objects. Use the Selection only for direct interaction with the user. - Work with screen updating switched off or, better still, with the document or Word itself hidden. Apart from that, VBA coding, as far as performance goes, is subject to the same general principles as VB coding: check the VB forums and discussion sites. > I took a look at this ng's FAQs and could only locate one article (by Daryl > Lucas) with some pointers regarding speeding up Word Automation from VB6. [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] > > Dan Thanks for your response. We are primarily taking data from a table used by our program and writing the data to a report created using Word. To give an example...one report requires the building of approx. 10, five colum tables to output a two page report. Without having actually measured the time it takes, I can say that it seems to take quite a long time, in the range of 30 seconds or more. This, for a report that I wouldn't consider terribly long. I have been sticking with using Range objects; screen updating is switched off; and Word is hidden (at least until the document has finished processing and is opened in Preview mode). One area in which I was hoping there would be a more efficient way to proceed...the examples I'm using (from various help files, etc.), show each Word table being populated cell by cell, from row to row (the "Z" pattern) using "For Each" iterations. Is this really the fastest way to go? The same goes for formatting these cells. I think I can probably learn ways to format the larger pieces (say at the table level) that are faster than doing so at a lower level (the cell level). Any input appreciated. Dan > Perhaps you could explain a little more of the issues you're dealing with? > Word automation isn't normally very slow unless you're doing silly things [quoted text clipped - 22 lines] > > > > Dan I'd forgotten about that type of automation. Yes, using Word to format output from another application can be very slow. I've given up trying to do it at all, for exactly that reason. Word will take a couple of minutes over a report that Access will do in half a second. That said, in addition to Jay's suggestions: use 'With .. End With' structures as much as possible when referring to Word objects (minimize the dots, as they say). This improves the efficiency of the data marshalling between the apps. Use a template at the Word end, with named styles, rather than applying formatting to the data you insert, and to avoid having to call Word's Page Setup function. Consider using Excel instead: you can paste an entire worksheet of data in a single instruction using variant arrays. For tabular data, Excel's formatting is pretty well as sophisticated as Word's anyway. And if you need to top-and-tail the table, you can have a static Word document with the spreadsheet section embedded as a linked object. > Thanks for your response. > [quoted text clipped - 52 lines] > > > > > > Dan A couple more tips: - In general, build as much of the automation as possible in macros within VBA, and call them from VB. The OLE interface between VB and VBA is often the slowest part of the operation, so minimize the message-passing between them. - For tables specifically, the fastest method is usually to build up the text of the table as ordinary text, with tabs between columns and a paragraph mark at the end of each row. When it's all ready, use ConvertTextToTable. Also see http://www.word.mvps.org/FAQs/TblsFldsFms/FastTables.htm. -- Regards, Jay Freedman Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org >Perhaps you could explain a little more of the issues you're dealing with? >Word automation isn't normally very slow unless you're doing silly things [quoted text clipped - 22 lines] >> >> Dan Thanks all for the comments/suggestions. I played with this today using some of the suggestions on the MVP site and was able to reduce the time it takes to process tables significantly (very significantly!). Now I'm working trying to figure out how to reduce the resource consumption. The CPU goes to 100% while the document is being written in code, then (oddly) stays at 100% for a long time (60 to 120) seconds after that (I'm using a table with five columns and 1000 rows for testing purposes). Any thoughts here would be appreciated. Dan > I took a look at this ng's FAQs and could only locate one article (by Daryl > Lucas) with some pointers regarding speeding up Word Automation from VB6. [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] > > Dan We have applications written in VB6 which are producing large 200 - 500 pages word documents with a lot of content, such as : pictures, tables, styles, etc. After installation of MS Word 2003 the performance decreased tremendously, from 40 min to 4 hours per 200 pages. We also noticed that as document gets bigger, then we begin to notice slowing down. We contacted Microsoft, but haven't heard the from them > I took a look at this ng's FAQs and could only locate one article (by Daryl > Lucas) with some pointers regarding speeding up Word Automation from VB6. [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] > > Dan We have application written in VB 6.0 which costructs large Word documents 200 -500 pages with a lot of content, such as: pictures, tables, styles, etc. It was taking about 40 min to build 200 pages document. We had used this application from Word 97 to Word 2002. Recently we had our stations upgraded with Office 2003 and we have experienced tremendous performance degrade. It took about 4 hours to do the same document. Is anybody aware what happens? We have contacted Microsoft, but so far we have not received an answer. > I took a look at this ng's FAQs and could only locate one article (by Daryl > Lucas) with some pointers regarding speeding up Word Automation from VB6. [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] > > Dan
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