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
    2014-01-20T00:03:57+00:00

    I just installed Office 2013 along with Windows 8.1. I am horrified at all the usability issues with 8.1 but won't distract with that now. I have the same lengthy file save issues with my word docs. Exactly as described by  Silbenhai. It is really bad!

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  2. Anonymous
    2014-01-20T00:06:44+00:00

    I also just noticed that I can save to an SD Card quite a bit faster and even saving to Google Drive is faster. Saving to hard drive is the really slow one.

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  3. Anonymous
    2014-02-11T09:10:36+00:00

    Please keep in mind that this is a user-to-user forum. As far as I can tell, no one from Microsoft has replied to this thread so far.

    When I asked, through "MVP channels," about this issue a week ago, it might very well have been the first time Microsoft heard of the issue.

    "As far as you can tell"???

    The third post in this thread was from Guruprasad Ra back in January. Nothing he suggested worked so he disappeared.

    Microsoft's response to this issue is classic Microsoft arrogant mindset: "We're so dominant they have to use our product, so we don't have to really care." Either that or complete incompetence. There are no other real possibilities - this is not an isolated incident. No one else (except Apple) who is successful in IT could get away with repeated foolishness like this.

    Overall I really like Microsoft, but either this mindset or incompetence will be the downfall of Microsoft.

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  4. Anonymous
    2014-02-11T09:30:44+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

    Cheers indeed! Thank you VERY much! I can't tell you how glad I was to finally find this thread and a viable solution.

    Hard to believe it's a year after this thread was started and Guruprasad Ra from Microsoft tried, failed to help, and then disappeared. I can't believe Microsoft still hasn't fixed this. Customers are actually switching back to earlier versions of Office just be able to work. But then they're doing the same thing with Windows 8.

    I've been loyal to Microsoft for a long time, but arrogance and/or incompetence will be their downfall.

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  5. Anonymous
    2014-02-12T15:11:57+00:00

    I just wanted to add my voice to this. 

    MICROSOFT THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE!

    I need to search and copy from a large document and it is painful to wait so long. At first I thought a bug was crashing Word because I kept seeing the "not responding" message at the top of window.

    I am going to keep shutting down the program when it hangs to send problem reports to Microsoft.

    Signed,

    One very aggravated customer

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