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. Anonymous
    2013-04-25T00:06:45+00:00

    "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".

    Great, this works very well!

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  2. Anonymous
    2013-04-24T20:02:57+00:00

    ...

    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".

    ...

    Yepp, great, this seems to work. Finally a workaround!

    Thanks a lot!

    Peter

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  3. Anonymous
    2013-04-24T19:07:50+00:00

    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

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  4. Anonymous
    2013-04-24T03:02:03+00:00

    Thanks, eventually I realised that, although there is the risk of loosing formatting layouts from a clients document. I am currently using this workaround for a text-only file and it is going well.

    The irony is that I had been using a borrowed version of Word 2010 with no problems. However, when I could afford it, I did the right thing and purchased Office 2013. Unfortunately I was happier with 2010!

    Apart from the issue with lengthy saves, there are keystroke lag problems. Also, I do not like the save dialog at all; I already have a cloud service and do not like being badgered to use skydrive everytime I want to save a document.

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  5. Anonymous
    2013-04-24T02:50:05+00:00

    Nice idea, unfortunately it did not make any difference to the long save times for long *,docx documents on my computer.

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