Jumping to the End without Repaginating

Bob wondered if there is a way to jump to the end of a document, upon opening, without having the document repaginate. It seems that the repagination process slows him down a bit, and he is looking for a way to speed things up.

Before getting into an answer, it should be noted that the repagination process should only slow a person down if any of three conditions are met:

• Slow computer. If the computer is intrinsically slow or has quite a few other processes besides Word that are going on behind the scenes, then repagination can slow things down.
• Big document. An extremely long or quite complex document can result in slow repagination. Tests show that a straightforward 600-page document typically takes about three or four seconds to repaginate—not a big slowdown. If the document contained lots of footnotes, large graphics, hidden text, or other items that affect pagination, then the process would take longer.
• Bad document. If the document is heavily edited and older, then repagination can be slower. This apparently occurs after many, many intense editing sessions where lots of text is added, deleted, and moved around. Sometimes Word's internal document pointers can get "messed up."

The solutions to these conditions should be obvious to most readers, with the possible exception of the "bad document" cause. In this case, it is best to try to do a Save As using a new filename or, better still, to copy and paste the information from the old document to a new one.

That being said, if you still want to turn off pagination and jump to the end, this can be done, with a caveat. The caveat is that you can only turn off pagination if you are viewing the document in Normal view. If you switch to another view (Print Layout or Page Layout being the most common), then Word automatically does repagination and there is no way to turn it off.

The following short macro could be used as an AutoOpen macro for your document. When you open the document, Word switches to Normal view, turns off background repagination, and jumps to the end of the document.

Sub AutoOpen()
    If ActiveWindow.View.Type <> wdNormalView Then
        ActiveWindow.View.Type = wdNormalView
    End If
    Options.Pagination = False
    Selection.EndKey Unit:=wdStory
End Sub

The Options.Pagination property is the same setting you can make manually if you choose Tools | Options | General tab and toggle the Background Repagination check box. The setting of this check box is only meaningful if Word is operating in Normal view, thus the need to switch to that view prior to setting the option and jumping.

Remember that if you later do something that requires Word to repaginate (such as switching to Print Layout or Page Layout view or using the Go To feature to jump to a particular page number), then Word will dutifully repaginate your document, introducing the delay you want to avoid.

For completeness you may want to add an AutoClose macro to your document. This macro does nothing but turn on the background pagination option so that it will work normally with other documents.

Sub AutoClose()
    Options.Pagination = True
End Sub

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (1294) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Word (Word 2007 and later) here: Jumping to the End without Repaginating.