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?

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2015-04-29T06:18:07+00:00

    File - Options - Save - Save files in this format:

    After changing from DOCX to DOC, my bigger files save very quickly so make sure you check this, too.

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-04-01T17:49:53+00:00

    For comparison, saving my 1200-page document (which has thousands of endnotes, hundreds of cross-refs, six indexes, 100 partial TOC's, etc.) takes about 45 seconds. It's been getting slower gradually. Word 2013 must do lots of processing during the save because just copying the completed file to storage is much faster, so it's more than pure write time.

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  3. Anonymous
    2015-03-31T14:16:56+00:00

    This helped absolutely. Saving that took 10 to 20 seconds now happens in less than 2.

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  4. Anonymous
    2015-02-22T06:56:56+00:00

    My document is almost 1200 pages and about 7 MB. I save to a solid-state drive which has lots of room, over 120 GB. Usually the docx takes about 30 seconds to save but sometimes it takes over ten minutes. I don't know what determines whether it will save fast or slowly. However, I did not reset Check Spelling and Grammar because the doc still has spelling errors and typos so I assumed it was not checking spelling. I just resaved with spelling/grammar off and it was much faster, but I can't tell if that made the difference.

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  5. Anonymous
    2015-02-14T16:04:01+00:00

    Same problem here

    Document, 30 pages, about 75KB:

    • docx takes about 12 sec. to save *
    • after saving the document in the old doc-format:

    doc takes less then1 sec. to save

    Partial Solution

    Right click on the status bar on the bottom and disable "Spelling and Grammar Check"

    After that saving the same docx takes about 2 seconds

    * does not block user actions

    (It seems that Word 2013 pointlessly does things that are not really required before/while saving a docx, e.g. a (whole?) "Spelling and Grammar Check" and .... ? one should try other settings, perhaps there is a additional delay when "Spelling and Grammar Check" finds Errors, etc...)

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