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

Rufine, I know you can't use RTF, but have you tried to copy all to clipboard and paste using merge formatting into a new Word document?

I had similar issues of long save times (opening the document was a bit slow too) and lag when typing also when opening the document it would take some time to count all the pages and be ready to use.

After reading lots of posts on this thread I tried to disable background saves, then I tried WinWord / safe,  looked at the add-in COM stuff (chickened out), and even tried disabling all AutoComplete or any spelling or grammar or anything that might try to fix or monitor my document and it still was doggy.

The document was an "rtf" type of file format with about 410 pages and 120,000 words (about 1.6 MB). I admit that this particular document had been worked on and saved (or converted) by different applications (Word, Pages, WordPad, Pages New, Google Docs probably had it for a while too, who knows what else over the years - it was probably started in NotePad and worked on with TextEdit too) (the document is at least 10 years old) on multiple systems of differing OS.   

It is now getting fairly complex with tables, web addresses, bulleting and more.

I opened the document in Word 2013 and used the select all command and copied it to the clipboard, then pasted to a newly created Word 2013 document using the merge formatting option and so far everything seems to look great and works great too. I did select some options like spacing between paragraphs in the newly created document before pasting the data to it, so the end result is closer to what I was looking for.

My web address hyperlinks came through as active links even though they were not active in the original document - I guess I could have specified this in the new document before pasting but it doesn't really bother me so it stays that way. The new file is in the docx format and the size fell from 1.6 MB to 328 KB - I could not find any missing information in the new file and was surprised the new file was that much smaller.

So far so good - will see if over time the performance wanes.

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

That alone didn't fix the problem. As the original message said, doing all of the above did. As you can see from other replies here, other users are having the same problem.

Just wanted to update the post about the slowness issue (saving, pasting, typing response...).

I've learned a couple of things, and thought I'd share those findings.

I use "Snap" or split screen configuration almost all the time. So, I try to make MS Word "Wrap to Window" as WordPad can do. MS Word 2013 will not "Wrap to Window" in a conventional sense, but it does have the ability to view a page as Read Mode, Print Layout, or Web Layout.

In Web Layout view,  MS Word 2013 documents will "wrap" text to any size window - which is great for me as that's how I do lots of things typically.

The Problem of "document slowness" reappears whenever I try to use the "Web Layout" view and resize a window to fit a section of my screen. The computer has to render (compute positional information) for the entire long document every time I resize the window. Bottom line - it takes many more resources (CPU, RAM, HDD, Bus Bandwidth etc...)  to run MSWord 2013 in Web Layout view than Print Layout view (at least on this computer).

Oddly enough, the same document will run perfectly fast even with "Wrap to Window" enabled in WordPad. Unfortunately, WordPad does not have the "Welcome Back" Auto Bookmark Feature (not sure what the real name is, but you click the pop-up and it takes you to the last place you were working in the document) that MS Word 2013 has and that feature is useful - to me.

So as a half hearted workaround, I simply have increased the right margin (to about 3.7" when using the 8.5" x 11" paper size) of my entire document when in "Print Layout" view such that when that document is "Snapped" into a 1/2  or 1/3 screen window all the text and stuff appear within that width. I don't typically print most of these long documents any way.

The document is again "Fast" when configured like this. YMMV (your mileage may vary), but so far it is working for me. Tables in the long document appear to be undamaged, but they did not conform to the new narrow margins, no doubt there are other issues to consider as there are lots of different things inserted into the document. I'm hoping it all will fix itself when and if I put the margins back to normal - for now it seems fast, and the few tables I checked appeared to be intact.

SUMMARY SO FAR...

1. The things done in my previous post (select all, from the old document,  and paste using the merge formatting option to a new MS Word 2013 document) did help and reduced the file's size from 1.6 MB to 328 KB.
2. (also from previous post) After reading lots of posts on this thread I tried to disable background saves, then I tried WinWord / safe,  looked at the add-in COM stuff (chickened out), and even tried disabling all AutoComplete or any spelling or grammar or anything that might try to fix or monitor my document and it still was doggy. These things did not seem to help the speed of my document - at least that I could detect.
3. This post update by not using "Web Layout" view to get "Wrap to Window" feature has also helped significantly to speed the document up. Print Layout view is simply faster regardless of what you do with your margins.

Hopefully, we can find a few workarounds or at least determine what to avoid.

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...)

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.