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

I had this problem and tried all sorts of fixes. Disabling background saves works BUT you lose the autosaving and have to remember to save your work periodically. Eventually I noticed that documents created in 2013 saved without this delay whereas documents created in an earlier version of Word had the delay. Converting a document to the new format doesn't help one jot.

The answer is simple:

1. Save the original Word document in RTF file format
2. Open a NEW Word 2013 document and import the RTF file
3. Save the document in Word 2013 format

Result - No extended delays when saving AND you can keep your background saves.

Your result surprises me a lot. I've tried this. In my experience, saving was OK to start with but got gradually slower with each save. So, I suspect this is a temporary but not permanent fix. Have you used this some time/for a larger number of saves?

I had this problem and tried all sorts of fixes. Disabling background saves works BUT you lose the autosaving and have to remember to save your work periodically. Eventually I noticed that documents created in 2013 saved without this delay whereas documents created in an earlier version of Word had the delay. Converting a document to the new format doesn't help one jot.

The answer is simple:

1. Save the original Word document in RTF file format
2. Open a NEW Word 2013 document and import the RTF file
3. Save the document in Word 2013 format

Result - No extended delays when saving AND you can keep your background saves.

I agree Peter. The only thing you need to do to solve this issue is simply to disable background saves, which was already answered in this thread. I am not even sure what all that other stuff Dionysius mentions would help resolve.

Hello, Dionysius,

Your entry puzzels me. Why go through all that trouble when it has been established that just one of your actions - disable background saving - solves the issue? 

P.

Hi all,

I have been following this thread with interest, and struggling with this same problem, so let me report what I've done so far.

First, clean up:

• Deleted COM plug-ins
• Repair install

Then configuration changes:

• Disable Hardware Acceleration
• Remove internet from locations to save to
• Disable background saving

Results over the last 24 hours have been radically improved. I am working with a large and complicated document and so far response times have been much improved.

I thank Stefan Blum and others here who have tried to engage the community and find solutions to this issue. My guess is that it could be multiple issues at once, on two levels: first, other programs can cause bad behaviors in Word and vice-versa; second, there may be multiple configuration options in Word that must be changed to avoid this behavior.

I hope others continue to post their stories because in my experience, that is how debugging occurs: the user relates their configuration, the steps they took and the results they obtained, and the debugger tries to replicate the problem so they can fiddle with it and see if they can stop it from happening and/or understand what made it happen. For this reason, it is helpful for users to post their configuration, the process they used and exact results that occurred.

I am considering submitting as a test document an out-of-copyright longer text, marked up with styles in a hierarchical manner as this seemed to produce the greatest slowdown.