I am finding Publisher 2013 unbelievably slow, so slow as to be unworkable.

Tim,

I appreciate what you are saying. I too wish there were better channels to making input or offering feedback and bug reports to MS. I also wish they were more responsive when they do become aware of bugs and problems.

Not to make excuses, I do know that there are a lot of things and in-house politics that go on in the background at MSFT that we are not aware of that get in the way of more timely fixes. Publisher has always been treated like a neglected adopted child and does not get the resources that other Office core programs do. Also sometimes what seems like it should be an easy fix is a lot more complicated than we can imagine. Fixing one thing can sometimes break something else...that is why installing all the automatic patches and updates is like playing Russian Roulette.  It is what it is and the best we can do sometimes is to try to find workarounds. Or go to other programs...

In your case it sounds like you are having problems with large high resolution pictures. I hesitate to make another 'ineffective' suggestion but it seems to me that Publisher 2013 is more apt to choke on large images than older versions. In Pub 2010 and older when you viewed the Graphics Manager and clicked on Change picture display... the Picture Display dialogue gave you three options. Detail Display, Fast Resize and zoom and Hide Pictures. As of Pub 2013 MSFT changed this and stripped out the Fast Resize and zoom option. I find myself wondering if their tinkering with this whole 'module' is part of the reason why Pub 2013 does not handle large, high res images as well as it did.

As of Pub 2013 you either deal with the high res images or you turn them off while you are working on the layout. There is no in-between where you dealt with a lower resolution image when it came to redrawing the page when you moved pictures or other elements around. I assume you don't want to compress your images and I know it isn't a fix, but in your case you might temporarily try the Hide Pictures option while you are laying out your page, after inserting and sizing your large images. You might find it easier to work with an image place holder and the text boxes and other elements of the page, and then before you finalize your layout go back and change the option back to Detail Display.

FWIW I am old school and don't rely on Publisher image editing capability. I always use third party image editors to tweak, size, edit and optimize my images before I insert them into Publisher. It takes extra time but I have found I get better results sometimes. Though MSFT has added a lot of image editing functionality to Publisher over the years don't forget it is a DTP not an image editor.

And finally you probably know this but go to View > check Boundaries so you can see the boundaries of text boxes and image placeholders without needing to mouseover them. I don't know why this isn't turned on by default but it sure makes it hard to layout your pages if you can't see the boundaries of the design elements.

I am rambling now...nuff said.

DavidF

Thanks David,

I should have better stated my comments regarding MVPs to indicate this appears to be a shortcoming on the part of Microsoft. It would seem ideal if Microsoft would provide a means for MVPs to bring issues such as these to the attention of the group(s) responsible for addressing issues and creating fixes. I would think it would behoove Microsoft to see threads such as this, to understand that there is still an issue in addition to those corrected by previous fixes. This is indeed the type of thing that leads me to look to other products from companies such as Serif that provide competent software at a reasonable price.

Can you imagine how frustrating it is to spend nearly 5 hours creating a project in Publisher that should have taken 30 minutes otherwise? I tried using several of my other programs such as Word and PowerPoint to do the same since they have some rudimentary capabilities of creating output similar to what I'm attempting to achieve, however they both lack on or two key capabilities. My next option is to use one of my PDF editors (not Acrobat) or one of my CAD programs. They might take me a bit of time, but at least I know they don't have performance issues.

Thanks, Tim