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

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

Yes, the problem does only appear if you use the "new" file format *.docx. Saving the file as *.doc seems to be the best workaround.

Come on, MS, this is such an obvious bug that should be easy to fix...!?

I have had SLOW saving problems in ALL MS Word documents with just a few lines of plain text, even newly created docs. e.g. I create new doc, type a sentence, wait 10 seconds for a save. subsequent saves 5 seconds. used to be instant.

I went into options and UNCHECKED "allow background saves' and voila issue fixed. Thanks for the tip! worked for me. saving is now instant - maybe this is an issue due to upgrade from Windows 8.1 to 10 this year (which generally made my PC faster - a first for Microsoft!). 

how to do it: FOR MS office Word 2007 users, click the office button (round colourful icon top left hand corner), at bottom of screen click 'word options' then select 'advanced' and scroll down to the 'save' section. 

In general, I would concur that Word remains buggy (well up to my version anyway), and still isn't fully up to the task as well as it should be. Rant continues below...

...bugs I noticed back in the 1990s in Word excel etc  never got fixed, and perhaps the single best feature innovation they made - spellcheck - isn't something I have seen improve (although i slavishly have used autocorrect and saved my autocorrect logs (ACL files) and moved then between computers for decades now). So I use google docs, which is brilliant at suggesting a correction for misspelled words - the engine is very context sensitive/predictive.

(by the way I am using Microsoft Office Word 2007, on a Windows 10 computer with SSD, which is FAST. Still using old MS Office as I could not be bothered learning - confusing - new menu layouts all over again every few years for no benefit, plus I am saving money I dont need to spend, and security patches are still being issued right up until this week in 2016).

if you disable the hardware acceleration as I suggested you are able to reach the same performance of Word 2010 with all the file formats (also docx).

PROCEDURE:

1. First open any Office 2013 program. For example open Word 2013. It'll open in new Start Screen mode. Click on "Blank document" option.
2. Now click on "File" menu present in the ribbon and then click on "Options" link given at the end of the left-sidebar.
3. It'll open Options window. Click on "Advanced" tab and scroll down a little. Look for the following option in "Display" section:

Disable hardware graphics acceleration

After that you will be able to use word 2013 and it will be fast and responsive also with docx format.

Best regards

Yes, the problem does only appear if you use the "new" file format *.docx. Saving the file as *.doc seems to be the best workaround.

Come on, MS, this is such an obvious bug that should be easy to fix...!?

Yes this is a bug.

I solved it disabling the hardware acceleration of Word2013 in  "Advanced settings".

I hope MS can be able to solve this frustrating issue.

Best regards.