Google Docs: Lesson Learned

I had a text document on Google Docs that had swelled over the years to 422 pages with numerous diagrams and my Pi 400 with its meagre 4GB of RAM would struggle to open it. Similarly my poor old 2013 MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM would also have trouble. I finally decided that it was time to break it up into a series of smaller files. This was easier by the fact that I had already organised the content into alphabetical order. It was a simple matter of assigning the content under each letter to a new file. The original document just served as a master index to link to these new files. Figure 1 shows what it looks like now.

Figure 1: part of the opening page

Some of the files are still over 80 pages but the loading is now much faster. There seems to be a critical size for files and that, once reached, the loading time significantly increases. Figure 2 shows what the opening page of the P file looks like.

Figure 2: opening page of P document

The number of pages of the original document grew over a period of more than seven years and the lesson learned for me is that, if you're going to create something that will grow slowly but continually, make use of multiple, linked documents and don't go for the monolithic single document. It took me a good few hours to effect the changeover and the process was quite tedious and repetitive.

It's not that my Internet is too slow. Figure 3 shows the result of the speed test that I just ran.

Figure 3

I just think that there's something about Google Docs that causes it to not cope well with documents that have hundreds of pages and numerous graphics.