Mail Merge Speed - Lack Of

[scottly]

The first time in a session of using Alpha that I do a Mail Merge it takes about 15-20 seconds (sometimes longer) to open M/S Word (2000) on my 3GHZ/512MB SCSI Disk PC - even with nothing else running on the PC. Subsequent Mail Merges in the same session is much quicker - about 1 second.

In comparison, If I do a mail merge from MYOB (an accounting package) it takes 1 second flat every time - why is A5v6 so slow to invoke M/S Word for the first mail merge - is there any way this can be spead up? - my customers hate it.

Regards,
Scott

[scottly]

RE: Mail Merge Speed - Lack Of

Are no other developers customers complaining about this?

[AaronBBrown]

RE: Mail Merge Speed - Lack Of

You might want to wait more than an hour and a half for a response. ;)

The initial delay is caused by loading the Word OLE object. Only Microsoft has control over that.

[scottly]

RE: Mail Merge Speed - Lack Of

Are there other methods? I wonder what MYOB and the like use to achieve such a fast mail merge process regardless if it is the first time or other?

Regards,
Scott

[whanigsberg]

RE: Mail Merge Speed - Lack Of

by chance I did a mail merge operation today and it went quickly. The dataset was small, though.

Bill

(worse machine than yours)

By the way, do you detect a difference between versions 5 and 6?

[Selwyn Rabins]

RE: Mail Merge Speed - Lack Of

are they using OLE Automation to interact with Word?

you have the source code to the Word Mail Merge feature in A5. It is only a few lines of Ole automation code. why don't you time which of the commands is taking a long time.

if it is the intial command that instantiates Word that is taking a long time, you might want to load Word in a background thread when you open your database. then, by the time the user wants to do a mail merge with word, Word will already have been loaded into memory.

[scottly]

RE: Mail Merge Speed - Lack Of

It is this command that takes a long time on the first merge:

merge = doc.MailMerge()

This would suggest that loading the app on start-up will not help the issue - but I will play with it and see..

Regards,
Scott

[archimedes]

RE: Mail Merge Speed - Lack Of

The only way that anyone is going to be able to tell anything about this one is to run each of the samples from a fresh boot. Otherwise, cache will affect the results, strongly. Now, if MYOB still runs in 1 second and A5V? still takes 20-30 seconds, then there is a real problem.

[scottly]

RE: Mail Merge Speed - Lack Of

yes - been there done that. MYOB off a fresh boot with a complex mail merge 2 seconds max. A5 off a fresh boot, simple mail merge (a couple of fields) 20 seconds plus for first merge run (small merge - 1 record only and a couple of fields to be merged from a 20 field table).

I do not know if MYOB uses OLE yet - I will need to find out how they do it. I have found that adding:

dim app as p
app = ole.GetObject("","word.application.9")

to the database startup reduces the time down by 5 to 10 seconds - for what ever reason. (.9 refers to the version - not sure if that helps any or not yet).

Scott

[scottly]

RE: Mail Merge Speed - Lack Of

I did not recall v5 being slow - and do not have an install of v5 anymore in order to compare - maybe someone who has v5 could do a simple test.

Scott

[Selwyn Rabins]

RE: Mail Merge Speed - Lack Of

merge = doc.MailMerge() is a Microsoft Word command. The speed is this command has nothing to do with A5, since the command is being executed by Microsoft Word.

[Marcel Kollenaar]

RE: Mail Merge Speed - Lack Of

How to speed up Word Automation by hiding the application

http://word.mvps.org/faqs/interdev/MakeAppInvisible.htm

[scottly]

RE: Mail Merge Speed - Lack Of

I have tried a few things but to no avail so maybe word is the problem as you suggest . I will have to assume that MYOB has some turbo charged approach to a word merge that we are all not aware of.

Scott

[scottly]

RE: Mail Merge Speed - Lack Of

Thanks Marcel - I could not detect much improvement. All a mystery as to why doc.mailmerge() takes so long to execute on the first go.

Regards,
Scott

[Selwyn Rabins]

RE: Mail Merge Speed - Lack Of

perhaps this is a question that someone at microsoft would care to answer.