Outlook
 Outlook
Journal can cause WinWord Performance Degradation
Posted June 24, 1997
Thanks to Stuart C. Sweet
The Problem:
I had written a VBA routine in MSAccess which took advantage of the file converters in
Word to convert Word Perfect documents to text before importing the text into a table. I
noticed that the time required to do the conversion using the following function increased
substantially after several hundred iterations (I was moving a lot of documents!):
Public Function WinwordToText(SrcStub As String)
With WordObj
.Documents.Open (SrcStub & ".doc")
.ActiveDocument.SaveAs SrcStub & ".txt", wdFormatTextLineBreaks
.ActiveDocument.Close
End With
End Function
The Solution:
It turned out that carrying out the same function manually in Word (saving a file
as text and then closing it) was also substantially slower. After trying everything I
could think of (deleting temp files, checking and defragmenting the disk etc.) I started
looking for large files that were being changed about the same time as what I was doing
and found one called "offitems.log" which when I renamed it made the performance
problem go away.
To make a long story short, that file is generated when you have logging of Word actions
(and for that matter other Office97 components) turned on but are not running Outlook
concurrently. It apparently gets processed when you open Outlook (and can cause the
startup of Outlook to be much slower).
The automatic logging of all Office Components is the default behavior after a clean
Office97 installation. If you turn off the journaling function in Outlook (or I suppose if
you have Outlook running concurrently but haven't tested this) you don't get this
performance hit.
See also:
OL97: Outlook Starts Slowly with AutoJournal Feature
http://www.microsoft.com/kb/articles/q166/8/50.htm
OL97: Office Programs Stop Responding While Outlook Is Busy
http://www.microsoft.com/kb/articles/q167/9/75.htm
OL97: Outlook Continues to Run After Exit with AutoJournal
http://www.microsoft.com/kb/articles/q166/8/52.htm |
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