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
    2013-02-13T20:57:58+00:00

    That is definitely not the issue. I am not running Office 2010 and 2013 side by side. Office 2010 was completely uninstalled and removed before I installed Office 2013 and ran into the above problems.

    In the meantime I also had the chance to test this behaviour on another system: Installed Office 2013 on a clean system and worked with the files I have had problems with on my system. The clean system showed the exact same issues: Slow saving and pasting into long documents.

    I am experiencing the exactly same problem as Silbenhai. How come this issue is invisible to experts from Microsoft??? I got two computer. Saving a large file is fast in word 2010, but very slow in 2013.  I notice that file saving can active a function of "searching for issues", which can be seen during file saving process by going to "FILE" and click on "info" I wonder if the slow saving problem is caused by this "searching for issues" ?  I am expecting solution, since I am working on a 300 pages long document and slow-saving is definitely not a good experience. Thank you very much.

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  2. Anonymous
    2013-02-18T18:59:21+00:00

    I feel the same issue. 

    I am having a document of 40 pages roughly and more than 10,000 words  .

    The saving to disk is so fast with office 2010 but is a mess with offfice 2013 as its very slow.

    Please fix thsi.

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  3. Anonymous
    2013-02-24T11:17:42+00:00

    I have the same problem. Long document (300 pages), saved very fast in Word 2010 but takes minutes now (on flash disk). I have made the following experiments:

    * Saving the document to rtf - very fast!

    * Saving the rtf document back to Word format - the problem returns

    * Closing all Word documents and getting back in - still very slow

    * Rebooting the computer - fast saving to start with, then gradually getting slower

    I suspect the probelm might have something to do with SkyDrive, although I've done all I can to disable it.

    I'm quite sure it's not due to installation problems since the problem is so specific. It's not due to general computer problems either since everything else works fine. It's isolated to Word 2013.

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  4. Anonymous
    2013-02-24T13:22:45+00:00

    I have the same problem with a 50 page document, saving it takes about 15 seconds. It doesn't matter whether I'm in Compatibility Mode or saving in the Word 2013 format.

    While saving slowly, Word 2013 is only using 0.4% of the CPU.

    It's running on a pretty clean Windows 8 64bit system, saving to an SSD with TRIM enabled, also running Dropbox--though I suspect neither or these should make any difference. Saving with Word 2013 was a little slower than 2010 from the start.

    After saving the same file to different locations three times, saving suddenly was fast again. (but still slower than Word 2010)

    Hope Microsoft are aware of this issue and providing a fix soon.

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  5. Anonymous
    2013-03-21T20:42:05+00:00

    Yes, I am very frustrated with the same issue.  I noted that those using smaller files than I am have the same problem.  Mine is 1123 pages with 3500 footnotes and I assumed that the length was a problem However, sometimes it has saved fairly quickly and I have no idea why.

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