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
    2013-03-24T14:57:16+00:00

    I haven't tried this with other documents, yet. 

    However, I can reproduce the quick-saving effect that you describe when I close & save a document. This seems like a useful workaround to me (unless you are working with different windows (Fenster) on that document).

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  2. Anonymous
    2013-03-24T14:13:31+00:00

    Hi,

    that's interesting. Does this apply to all documents, or just this document?

    I've also found that if you're saving the file while closing Word, the saving is as fast as it can be. But only when you're closing the application.

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  3. Anonymous
    2013-03-23T18:33:30+00:00

    Hi all,

    I've had the same problems with my dissertation. However, playing around seems to have solved the problem for me:

    First, I saved my large file (docx / Word 2007) to the new format (docx / Word 2013).

    Second, I opened the style sheets dialog (Formatvorlagen) and copied the style sheets from the old document (2007) to the new document (2013), overwriting the  style sheets in the 2013 docx.

    Word saves a lot quicker, now.

    Hope this works out for you as well.

    MaTsee

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  4. Anonymous
    2013-03-21T20:42:05+00:00

    Yes, I am very frustrated with the same issue.  I noted that those using smaller files than I am have the same problem.  Mine is 1123 pages with 3500 footnotes and I assumed that the length was a problem However, sometimes it has saved fairly quickly and I have no idea why.

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  5. Anonymous
    2013-02-24T13:22:45+00:00

    I have the same problem with a 50 page document, saving it takes about 15 seconds. It doesn't matter whether I'm in Compatibility Mode or saving in the Word 2013 format.

    While saving slowly, Word 2013 is only using 0.4% of the CPU.

    It's running on a pretty clean Windows 8 64bit system, saving to an SSD with TRIM enabled, also running Dropbox--though I suspect neither or these should make any difference. Saving with Word 2013 was a little slower than 2010 from the start.

    After saving the same file to different locations three times, saving suddenly was fast again. (but still slower than Word 2010)

    Hope Microsoft are aware of this issue and providing a fix soon.

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