Best Practices Large Word Documents

Question

We're using Teams for document collaboration.

A number of our users are expressing frustration that large documents (typically including many graphics) are crashing. Are there best practices that can limit or avoid crashes while allowing collaboration?

Answer 1

Hi,

Some general best practices:

1. Use Styles for your formatting, not direct formatting. See https://www.addbalance.com/usersguide/styles.htm#Overview. This makes your files smaller and much less complex.
2. Avoid editing in Word's online (browser) version.
3. Use Page-Break-Before formatting in appropriate heading styles instead of manual page break.
4. Whenever possible, place images in-line with text.
5. Do not use any blank paragraphs.
6. Use Word's built-in heading styles when appropriate - the appearance can be modified. https://www.addbalance.com/usersguide/10HeadingStyles.htm
7. If necessary, when editing, break into individual documents, all based on same template and using same styles. You can combine them using Word MVP Graham Mayor's Boiler Add-In. http://www.gmayor.com/Boiler.htm
8. Do not use the "Master Documents" feature in Word for anything other than printing. Never edit subdocuments when using this. Have off-line backups of all. https://addbalance.com/word/masterdocuments.htm#PageStart

See also: https://www.addbalance.com/usersguide/BasicConceptsWord.htm

Answer 2

Hi @Jeanne Goodman

Thanks for the information.

While to troubleshoot this issue, we may need to collect Teams logs for analysis.
Please consider contacting support in Microsoft 365 admin center so they can look into this issue.
Thanks for your understanding.

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Answer 3

@Kael Yao-MSFT Thank you so much for your reply. I'm not trying to fix a specific issue. I'm wondering if you have general best practices for large documents.

Thanks,

Jeanne