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: 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. 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. 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?

I did a clean install to a new Windows 8 PC and got the slow save problem. Endured it for a few weeks and then Goggled this thread and am now reverting to the 1997-2003 format - solves the problem. Clearly an astonishing bug for long documents with footnotes. And no solution from Microsoft. Amazing.

The weirdest thing happened at my end. The "bad" document was one that I had been editing on another machine, in WinXP and Word 2007, then brought over to my laptop which is Win8 and Word 2013. When I received a new document and opened it exclusively on my laptop the problem seemed to clear up. However. I just did the update to Win8.1 and am about halfway into the document I'm editing (a novel, about 66K words) and the lag is starting to take effect again. Has anyone else noticed problems with Office after updating Windows to 8.1? Thanks! I will be contacting Microsoft Support via Twitter (I find the Microsoft site itself to be virtually un-navigable) and sending them a link to this conversation. Maybe then someone will actually, you know, FIX THE PROBLEM so that we don't have to go rooting around in the background to try and slap together a solution.

Hi All, I'm a UK user. My PC is a brand-new Dell XPS 8700 - i7, 24GB of RAM, Windows 8 (recently updated to 8.1), and Office 2013. I'm having the same issues, and I've managed to fix them by converting to .doc or disabling background saving. I haven't tried any other suggested workarounds. I'm sure there's a simple solution, and I'm sure MS can find it. I'm going to tweet @office now. I'll link to this thread on my FB wall too. Thanks for the contributions, everyone. They've been really helpful.

I had the same problem with ALL long word documents and all of them worked fine with Word 2010, so it was not a corruption problem. The only solution that seems to work is Go to Settings -> Advanced ->Save and disable "Allow Background saves".

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

Anonymous

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:

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.
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.
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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Anonymous

2013-10-13T16:24:27+00:00

I did a clean install to a new Windows 8 PC and got the slow save problem. Endured it for a few weeks and then Goggled this thread and am now reverting to the 1997-2003 format - solves the problem. Clearly an astonishing bug for long documents with footnotes. And no solution from Microsoft. Amazing.
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Anonymous

2013-10-21T16:43:45+00:00

The weirdest thing happened at my end. The "bad" document was one that I had been editing on another machine, in WinXP and Word 2007, then brought over to my laptop which is Win8 and Word 2013. When I received a new document and opened it exclusively on my laptop the problem seemed to clear up.

However.

I just did the update to Win8.1 and am about halfway into the document I'm editing (a novel, about 66K words) and the lag is starting to take effect again. Has anyone else noticed problems with Office after updating Windows to 8.1?

Thanks! I will be contacting Microsoft Support via Twitter (I find the Microsoft site itself to be virtually un-navigable) and sending them a link to this conversation. Maybe then someone will actually, you know, FIX THE PROBLEM so that we don't have to go rooting around in the background to try and slap together a solution.
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Anonymous

2013-11-04T22:26:53+00:00

Hi All,

I'm a UK user. My PC is a brand-new Dell XPS 8700 - i7, 24GB of RAM, Windows 8 (recently updated to 8.1), and Office 2013. I'm having the same issues, and I've managed to fix them by converting to .doc or disabling background saving. I haven't tried any other suggested workarounds.

I'm sure there's a simple solution, and I'm sure MS can find it. I'm going to tweet @office now. I'll link to this thread on my FB wall too.

Thanks for the contributions, everyone. They've been really helpful.
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Anonymous

2014-01-08T09:17:43+00:00

I had the same problem with ALL long word documents and all of them worked fine with Word 2010, so it was not a corruption problem.

The only solution that seems to work is Go to Settings -> Advanced ->Save and disable "Allow Background saves".
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