I am using the latest Word 2013 RC in German. Allthough I am very pleased with the overall performance and features of this new version, I ran into some very annoying problems, that didn't exist with the latest Word 2010. These should be easy to reproduce: Take a long document (*.docx) with at least 100 pages and try to save it. This takes forever - I can see the progress bar filling up slowly. It takes at least 10-20 seconds to save. During that process I cannot do anything within Word - not even scroll smoothly. It slows down to the point of almost freezing up. I didn't have this problem with Word 2010 on the same system. Take that same document (>100 pages) and try to copy&paste some text (for example out of Firefox) and paste it as plain text - this takes at least 1 to 2 seconds. I didn't have any kind of delay with Word 2010. Word 2013 seems to work ok with *.doc files - it's still slower than Word 2010 a lot faster than saving *.docx files. I have no problems whatsoever with short documents. Can anyone confirm these problems with Word 2013 RC?

Please keep in mind that this is a user-to-user forum. As far as I can tell, no one from Microsoft has replied to this thread so far. When I asked, through "MVP channels," about this issue a week ago, it might very well have been the first time Microsoft heard of the issue. "As far as you can tell"??? The third post in this thread was from Guruprasad Ra back in January. Nothing he suggested worked so he disappeared. Microsoft's response to this issue is classic Microsoft arrogant mindset: "We're so dominant they have to use our product, so we don't have to really care." Either that or complete incompetence. There are no other real possibilities - this is not an isolated incident. No one else (except Apple) who is successful in IT could get away with repeated foolishness like this. Overall I really like Microsoft, but either this mindset or incompetence will be the downfall of Microsoft.

I also just noticed that I can save to an SD Card quite a bit faster and even saving to Google Drive is faster. Saving to hard drive is the really slow one.

I just installed Office 2013 along with Windows 8.1. I am horrified at all the usability issues with 8.1 but won't distract with that now. I have the same lengthy file save issues with my word docs. Exactly as described by Silbenhai. It is really bad!

I had the same problem with ALL long word documents and all of them worked fine with Word 2010, so it was not a corruption problem. The only solution that seems to work is Go to Settings -> Advanced ->Save and disable "Allow Background saves".

Hi All, I'm a UK user. My PC is a brand-new Dell XPS 8700 - i7, 24GB of RAM, Windows 8 (recently updated to 8.1), and Office 2013. I'm having the same issues, and I've managed to fix them by converting to .doc or disabling background saving. I haven't tried any other suggested workarounds. I'm sure there's a simple solution, and I'm sure MS can find it. I'm going to tweet @office now. I'll link to this thread on my FB wall too. Thanks for the contributions, everyone. They've been really helpful.

Word 2013: Extremely slow saving and pasting plain text in long documents

Anonymous

I am using the latest Word 2013 RC in German. Allthough I am very pleased with the overall performance and features of this new version, I ran into some very annoying problems, that didn't exist with the latest Word 2010. These should be easy to reproduce:

Take a long document (*.docx) with at least 100 pages and try to save it. This takes forever - I can see the progress bar filling up slowly. It takes at least 10-20 seconds to save. During that process I cannot do anything within Word - not even scroll smoothly. It slows down to the point of almost freezing up. I didn't have this problem with Word 2010 on the same system.
Take that same document (>100 pages) and try to copy&paste some text (for example out of Firefox) and paste it as plain text - this takes at least 1 to 2 seconds. I didn't have any kind of delay with Word 2010.
Word 2013 seems to work ok with *.doc files - it's still slower than Word 2010 a lot faster than saving *.docx files.

I have no problems whatsoever with short documents. Can anyone confirm these problems with Word 2013 RC?

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

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163 answers

Anonymous

2014-02-11T09:10:36+00:00

Please keep in mind that this is a user-to-user forum. As far as I can tell, no one from Microsoft has replied to this thread so far.

When I asked, through "MVP channels," about this issue a week ago, it might very well have been the first time Microsoft heard of the issue.

"As far as you can tell"???

The third post in this thread was from Guruprasad Ra back in January. Nothing he suggested worked so he disappeared.

Microsoft's response to this issue is classic Microsoft arrogant mindset: "We're so dominant they have to use our product, so we don't have to really care." Either that or complete incompetence. There are no other real possibilities - this is not an isolated incident. No one else (except Apple) who is successful in IT could get away with repeated foolishness like this.

Overall I really like Microsoft, but either this mindset or incompetence will be the downfall of Microsoft.
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Anonymous

2014-01-20T00:06:44+00:00

I also just noticed that I can save to an SD Card quite a bit faster and even saving to Google Drive is faster. Saving to hard drive is the really slow one.
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Anonymous

2014-01-20T00:03:57+00:00

I just installed Office 2013 along with Windows 8.1. I am horrified at all the usability issues with 8.1 but won't distract with that now. I have the same lengthy file save issues with my word docs. Exactly as described by Silbenhai. It is really bad!
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Anonymous

2014-01-08T09:17:43+00:00

I had the same problem with ALL long word documents and all of them worked fine with Word 2010, so it was not a corruption problem.

The only solution that seems to work is Go to Settings -> Advanced ->Save and disable "Allow Background saves".
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Anonymous

2013-11-04T22:26:53+00:00

Hi All,

I'm a UK user. My PC is a brand-new Dell XPS 8700 - i7, 24GB of RAM, Windows 8 (recently updated to 8.1), and Office 2013. I'm having the same issues, and I've managed to fix them by converting to .doc or disabling background saving. I haven't tried any other suggested workarounds.

I'm sure there's a simple solution, and I'm sure MS can find it. I'm going to tweet @office now. I'll link to this thread on my FB wall too.

Thanks for the contributions, everyone. They've been really helpful.
Was this answer helpful?

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