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
    2014-11-26T18:37:06+00:00

    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.

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  2. Anonymous
    2014-11-26T22:02:21+00:00

    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.

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  3. Anonymous
    2014-12-12T09:18:02+00:00

    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?

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  4. Anonymous
    2014-12-12T13:08:47+00:00

    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?

    Since doing this copy and paste into a new document, we've had no problems. Our documents are large - the current one we are working on is 141,000 words and contains large graphics. It now saves quickly. We keep a backup on the cloud but mostly save local copies because we have a relatively slow broadband connection.  the MS method of converting a document to the new format produces files which take ages to save.

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  5. Anonymous
    2014-12-21T17:22:13+00:00

    I have a 1100 page document with 500k words...

    Saving to RTF doesn't work for me...

    I have graphics and links.

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