How to improve the performance of a document or presentation

This article explains how you can improve the performance of documents and presentations.

Word documents

When opening a Word document takes a long time, and browsing the document causes lagging or even Word to become unresponsive, this could be due to the following reasons:

• On the Review tab, Track Changes is enabled.
• The document contains a lot of revisions (comments, feedback from reviewers).
• The document has many collaborators/authors.
• The document contains many content controls.
• The document contains many pages.
• The document contains many high-resolution images.
• The document has a large file size.

Improving the document

Word document content

To improve the performance of the document follow the steps below.

• Accept all Track Changes.
  

  Important Only accept all Track Changes (remove them) if you are sure you don't need them anymore to support your work.

  
  

  Tip You can also manage tracking from reviewers by navigating to Review > Show Markup > Specific People. Uncheck specific individuals whose changes you no longer wish to keep, then accept all changes shown. Finally, restore visibility to all reviewers to see the remaining tracking.

• Delete old and resolved Comments.
• On the File tab go to Info > Check for Issues > Inspect Document:
  
• In the Document Inspector dialog click Inspect to check if the document contains any issues. The result looks like this:
  
• Remove the following (if applicable):
  
  • Comments, Revisions, and Versions (this might reduce the file size by more than 20%).
  • Invisible Content.
    

    Important Do not remove Document Properties and Personal Information as these values may need to be stored as metadata in e.g. SharePoint. Do not remove Custom XML Data as this removes Templafy smart fields (if present). Do not remove Headers, Footers, and Watermarks (if present).

• Click Reinspect to check if the issues are solved.

Templafy template configuration

When creating a Templafy template always follow the best practices. This also helps improving performance. For example:

• If a user creates a document, and never needs to update it (Update Document will not be used), then it might be an option to enable Remove and Keep Content in the template. This removes the content controls for smart fields so the document only keeps the plain text.
  

  Note This option is not available for text elements.

• Use an external data source when you have many records (see the Data sources section below).

PowerPoint presentations

When opening a PowerPoint presentation takes a long time and browsing the presentation causes lagging or even PowerPoint to become unresponsive, this could be due to the following reasons:

• The presentation contains multiple Slide Masters.
• The presentation contains many Layouts or slides.
• The presentation contains high-resolution images, videos, or embedded objects.
• The presentation contains a (high-resolution) image in the Slide Master or Layouts.
• The presentation has a large file size.

Improving the presentation

PowerPoint presentation content

To improve the performance of the presentation, follow the steps below.

• Simplify the Slide Master by reducing the number of elements.
  Do not add a (high-resolution) image to the Slide Master or Layouts.
• Compress images and videos and remove unnecessary embedded objects.
• On the File tab go to Info > Check for issues > Inspect Document:
  
• In the Document Inspector dialog click Inspect to check if the document contains any issues.
• Remove the following (if applicable):
  
  • Comments.
  • Invisible On-Slide Content.
    

    Important Do not remove Document Properties and Personal Information as these values might be needed to stored as metadata in e.g. SharePoint. Do not remove Custom XML Data as this removes Templafy smart fields (if present). Do not remove Presentation Notes.

• Click Reinspect to check if the issues are solved.

Templafy template configuration

When creating a Templafy template always follow the best practices. This also helps improving performance. For example:

• Only use one Slide Master in a presentation.
• Do not use more than 10-15 Layouts.
• Use an external data source when you have many records (see the Data sources section below).

Data sources

In a template you can create a list provided by a data source in the response form.

While a data source supports up to 300 schema fields (columns) and 50000 records (rows), it is recommended to use an external data source:

• When the data source has many columns and/or rows.
• When a template has many lists (dropdowns) using that data source.

For example, a template might have three (filtered) dropdowns where the user selects a company name in the first dropdown, then automatically the second dropdown shows the address and the third dropdown shows the phone number. If it's not required to show the address and phone number in the response form, but only in the document/presentation, then another solution is to only have the company name dropdown and use the DataSources[] function to fill all values in the document/presentation. Using this function instead of (filtered) dropdown(s) improves the performance.