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
    2013-01-23T15:35:22+00:00

    Sorry, that was a misunderstanding:

    I meant that I didn't run into problems with other documents, that only had plain text in them. However I had similar problems with other documents that matched the following criteria:

    long (>50 pages)

    custom style sheets

    footnotes

    It's easily reproduceable with other documents (I tested 3 different documents from different sources)

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  2. Stefan Blom 351.5K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2013-01-23T22:40:05+00:00

    OK. This does point to either a specific problem with Word 2013, which should be easy to reproduce for anyone using Word 2013 (I'm not one of them yet), or to a resources problem on your computer.

    I hope someone else can test this.

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  3. Anonymous
    2013-01-24T14:53:25+00:00

    Me too!

    If anyone is in need of a document that shows the described symptoms on my system, I'd be happy to provide one. Just let me know!

    I will try this on another system tomorrow (same documents, Windows 7, Word 2013) and let you know how it goes...

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  4. Stefan Blom 351.5K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2013-01-24T15:16:52+00:00

    Please report back with the result, yes.

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  5. Anonymous
    2013-01-30T06:33:25+00:00

    I am seeing the same behavior. I've got Word 2010 and Word 2013 installed side by side.

    A 272 page doc (80k words) saves instantly in Word 2010, but takes upward of 20 seconds to save in Word 2013. For writing a novel, this makes Word 2013 unusable.

    Which is unfortunate, because I love the new version of Word. I just wish it would save in a reasonable amount of time.

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