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

Anonymous
2013-01-16T14:12:48+00:00

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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?

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  1. Stefan Blom 351.7K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2013-08-20T14:04:00+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.

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  2. Anonymous
    2013-08-20T11:00:08+00:00

    Yes, Microsoft is looking at this problem now. Someone from the Product Group will post here if he or she needs additional information.

    Could you explain why this took so long? This thread was started in January. Why was serious investigation delayed until now? All we got was worthless advice indicating that MS thought we users just didn't know the basics round saving.

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  3. Stefan Blom 351.7K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2013-08-19T15:33:41+00:00

    Yes, Microsoft is looking at this problem now. Someone from the Product Group will post here if he or she needs additional information.

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  4. Anonymous
    2013-08-19T14:50:17+00:00

    Would anyone who has experienced the problem with slow saving in Word 2013 be willing to share an example document with the Office Product Group? Remove any sensitive information, upload the file to SkyDrive and post a link here. Thanks.

    Hi Stefan,

    I hope you are able to reproduce the problem using the instructions. I'd rather not upload any files because I don't know what other information they carry in them. Is the problem currently being investigated by the Office Product Group?

    Thank you.

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  5. Anonymous
    2013-08-16T08:19:57+00:00

    All it takes is any long document, with or without complex formatting, and Background Saving turned on. The file format doesn't matter, I suggest you try the newest Word 2013 format. Maybe 20% of the time, it will be fast, 80% of the time, it will be slow.

    Yes, this is true in my experience too. I have had this problem with all (longer) documents. It seems not to be related to document content.

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