While at work I'm using Windows XP Pro and Office 2003 on a Dell Dimension 4700 with a P4 Processor and 1 G of memory.

I'm creating Word documents, and part of what is included are tables that come from blocking portions of an Excel 2003 spreadsheet, copying and pasting into Word.

The Excel info is now in Word table format. If I paste in a part of one page of a three page spreadsheet that Explorer shows as being only 106kb, my Word file suddenly explodes in size to 1,147kb. The computer's pace slows down to a crawl -- it may take several minutes to scroll through a 10 page document. Printing is OK, and other applications seem to be running just fine. The only application that is affected is Word 2003. It often changes fonts and cell alignment from what was setup in Excel.

This never occured when I used Office 2000, but all of the files I'm working with originated in Office 2000. Is there a compatibility problem bringing old files into Word 2003?

I don't think there's a hardware problem, the only time the machine ever hangs up is when I copy Excel stuff into Word.

Does anyone have an idea of the cause, and an idea for a fix?

Thank you for you help,
Laney