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

Hi Floresia, if your document is currently being saved in the new .docm format, then you might try doing a Save As, and pick the "Word 97-2003 Document (*.doc)" format.

In my experience, that fixed the performance problems and made Word usable again. I still see the inexplicable behavior of an hourglass appearing briefly whenever I navigate using the keyboard (arrow keys, Home, End, PgUp, PgDn), but otherwise things are nice and fast.

Turning on/off background saves, and disabling/enabling hardware graphics acceleration had absolutely no effect. But switching away from the new .docm format did the trick, and keeps me going until Microsoft develops a fix.

Bruce, I have the similar problem and have no solution whatsoever.

I used to save (CTRL + S) every time finish a paragraph. And, when doing so, it freezes for 15-20 seconds to save a document, even a short document  and i cannot type anything during the moment of saving.

It is really really really frustrated and I consider to go back to Word 2010. What a waste of time and money.

Hoping MS will have a solution for us.

Hi all

I suffer from the same problem. Got a 60 page word which takes 20 seconds to save in Word 2013, but saved instantly in Word 2010.

But I think I found kind of a workaround (at least it decreased saving time to 1 second):

Go to Settings -> Advanced ->Save and disable "Allow Background saves".

Names might differ since I did this in the German version.

Tell me if this helped you too and if this is the way to go with Word 2013.

Cheers

Thanks for this idea! I have to admit that I don't like the idea of not having the background saves on, but then again, in Word 2013 the autosaves take forever (as soon as an autosave starts, I go make a sandwich, have a beer, and come back in time to watch the save finalize j/k lol).  So anyway the function seems like a good option. I'm in the habit of saving very frequently so I think this is a good option. Word 2013 has been crashing on me for various reasons so all the more important to make Ctrl + S an automatic reaction every few minutes. Thanks again.

OK. This does point to either a specific problem with Word 2013, which should be easy to reproduce for anyone using Word 2013 (I'm not one of them yet), or to a resources problem on your computer.

I hope someone else can test this.

I have had t his problem with Word 2013 as well (brand new Dell XPS 8500 computer with 24 gig ram and Intel c7 duo, fresh windows 8 install, fresh Word install). The save time is agonizing for many documents, some of which don't even have that many section breaks, images, tracked changes, or other complex components. But once you start adding in any or all of those things, which are common in the types of documents I edit and format, you end up losing a lot of time.  I know a 15-second save time might not seem like a lot to some people, but I am a compusive saver in order to not lose my work. I have indeed lost work in Word 2013 as it crashes a lot and does indeed have some bugs that were not there in 2010 (see my other posts for two, but there are others I haven't posted about yet). I actually do like 2013 (lots of nice things added), but man the save time is rough. Hopefully Microsoft can work on a patch for this or something?

Thanks mate! However this only seems to solve the problem with saving the files. However adding footnotes or pasting text is still extremely slow. I'd rather stick with *.doc format for now.