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
    2013-04-27T00:10:00+00:00

    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

    Thanks for this idea! I have to admit that I don't like the idea of not having the background saves on, but then again, in Word 2013 the autosaves take forever (as soon as an autosave starts, I go make a sandwich, have a beer, and come back in time to watch the save finalize j/k lol).  So anyway the function seems like a good option. I'm in the habit of saving very frequently so I think this is a good option. Word 2013 has been crashing on me for various reasons so all the more important to make Ctrl + S an automatic reaction every few minutes. Thanks again.

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  2. Anonymous
    2013-04-27T00:04:16+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.

    I have had t his problem with Word 2013 as well (brand new Dell XPS 8500 computer with 24 gig ram and Intel c7 duo, fresh windows 8 install, fresh Word install). The save time is agonizing for many documents, some of which don't even have that many section breaks, images, tracked changes, or other complex components. But once you start adding in any or all of those things, which are common in the types of documents I edit and format, you end up losing a lot of time.  I know a 15-second save time might not seem like a lot to some people, but I am a compusive saver in order to not lose my work. I have indeed lost work in Word 2013 as it crashes a lot and does indeed have some bugs that were not there in 2010 (see my other posts for two, but there are others I haven't posted about yet). I actually do like 2013 (lots of nice things added), but man the save time is rough. Hopefully Microsoft can work on a patch for this or something?

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  3. Anonymous
    2013-04-25T06:18:00+00:00

    Thanks mate! However this only seems to solve the problem with saving the files. However adding footnotes or pasting text is still extremely slow. I'd rather stick with *.doc format for now.

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  4. Anonymous
    2013-04-25T00:06:45+00:00

    "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".

    Great, this works very well!

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  5. Anonymous
    2013-04-24T20:02:57+00:00

    ...

    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".

    ...

    Yepp, great, this seems to work. Finally a workaround!

    Thanks a lot!

    Peter

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