A family of Microsoft relational database management systems designed for ease of use.
I had some time today; and here is a comparison of the time it takes to draw and format all the shapes compared to the time it takes to use DropMany (see times from my post yesterday). This even includes inserting field values and binding them to shape data elsewhere on the page.
I will change most of my code to programmatically draw these shapes instead of using drop or dropMany.
I would have liked to have kept using masters and dropping them, but I prefer the performance gain over convenience; plus it's not such a problem for me anymore since I've developed my own update method that doesn't rely on updating document masters. For others, drawing all their shapes programatically may not be an option if they depend on using document masters to keep their shapes up to date.
Here are the times that were recorded by drawing these shapes, formatting them, and adding field values (instead of using dropMany). This now runs 13x faster; or to say it in a statement that is mathematically correct... it is 99.999996% faster over the previous run time.
L3_Labels_and_status end of SHP variables 2.4209040537163E-04
L3_Labels_and_status end of Draw Shapes 6.03716721625012E-07
L3_Labels_and_status end of vsoCharacters 5.91431086339943E-03
L3_Labels_and_status end of SetFormulas #1 7.43054540976065E-03
L3_Labels_and_status end of SetFormulas #2 8.4164148161743E-03
L3_Labels_and_status end of SetFormulas #3 5.61607480291668E-03
L3_Labels_and_status end of SetFormulas #4 7.39673727334965E-03
L3_Labels_and_status end of SetFormulas #5 4.87018279334897E-03
L3_Labels_and_status end of sub 0.011657769894579