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
    2016-03-04T08:29:26+00:00

    same trouble. Very frustrating. I though my files were flawed. I tried to cut in half, then in half. You see...

    I disabled the background saving. No real improvement.

    Today, I installed Office 2016 and guess what? No more lag. Editing and scrolling and saving is as fast as before.

    So I can say:  problem solved with Word 2016

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  2. Anonymous
    2016-02-25T01:34:06+00:00

    I am experiencing this also -- hugely frustrating (550 page document, takes about 45 seconds to complete a "save").

    I noticed one thing of possible interest: After starting the save, if I go to File->Info, in the Inspect Document section mid-way down the page it has an active spinner which says, "Searching for issues". To the left is a "Check for Issues" box which opens a page with a bunch of checkboxes, but unchecking them doesn't seem to have any noticeable effect (FYI, if you try this, try unchecking all except for one -- if you uncheck all of them your changes won't stick).

    Ick ICk ICK!

    Barry

    P.S. Word got so confused when I did the above (unchecking all but one box, then trying a save), that it got stuck "Searching for issues" and never returned. At it's prompting, I had to restart it -- when it came up, it opened "Document1" (rather than the document I had been working on). I closed that and reopened my original document and now the save time has been cut in half (about 20 seconds), though the checkboxes are all checked once again.

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  3. Anonymous
    2016-02-24T03:10:52+00:00

    I have the same issue with documents as small as 10 pages. They are formatted.  The issue just recently started in the last week. I have had Office / word 2013 for many months without issues, but now it is non-functional.

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  4. Anonymous
    2016-01-20T00:48:16+00:00

    My nonfiction document is about 550,000 words in 980 pages. The tasks consisted of:

    1. Doing the research
    2. Writing
    3. Deciding on the page format and implementing it
    4. Preparing auxiliary material such as indexes, tables of contents, page headers, endnotes, and cross-references.
    5. Wrestling with MS Word.

        Of these, the last was by FAR the most difficult and annoying. If I were starting now, knowing what I know about Word, I would never choose it. (I know nothing about the alternatives so have no assurance that they're better.) But - Word has extensive support from other users and from MS itself. This can be very useful but did not help with the more serious bugs. I've encountered probably 50 or more bugs. It also has missing features which, if implemented, would help greatly. It is seriously hampered by some horrible design decisions. If I thought MS would pay attention and do anything about them, I would be glad to post my list. When I finish writing I will create a blog or use part of a website to describe the problems.

        Microsoft, spend a few million and turn Word into a truly professional-level tool.

    Stephen B. G ray

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  5. Anonymous
    2016-01-19T19:05:45+00:00

    how do I disable the background? I took a brief look at the control panel but as it wasn't obvious I couldn't do it. I appreciate any info you give me. Thanks.

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