Word 97—Internals

Performance

Making your interactions with Word faster than ever was a key goal for Word 97. Word treated Performance as a feature and made significant architectural changes to deliver this goal. We set up intricate benchmark tests to monitor our performance across a range of tasks that you do everyday – from starting Word to navigating through complex documents with lots of graphics, tables and OLE objects embedded. Here are some of the areas where you will notice a distinct speed improvement in your interactions with Word:

Word Speed

Word 97 is even faster than Word 95 and runs on a 486 33 with 8 MB of RAM. On this platform alone, loading Word is now at least 10% faster than Word 95.

File Save Improvements

We made specific file format changes to make the format more robust and easier to manage. These changes allow us to now deliver significant improvements in the file saving time.

• Single-pass Save – We have changed our saving model from multiple to single pass saving. This change not only makes file saving a faster operation, it also results in a more robust save since all information is saved at once.

Background Save

Just like background printing, saving now returns control to users instantly. We have taken advantage of the multi-threaded operating system and implemented background saving as a separate thread, allowing you to continue your work uninterrupted.

Faster OLE

Word 97 has made architectural changes to improve document editing, printing and navigation performance when you have OLE objects embedded. Now, no matter how many OLE objects you embed in your document, your scrolling speed will be unaffected, background printing will be unaffected, editing will be unaffected, and if you have a master document with OLE objects, opening the master document will be much faster than Word 95 and essentially unaffected by the number of OLE objects embedded.

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