office 2013 365

You have run into a new "feature" of Office 2013/365.  It is called "animation".  The feature does "funky" stuff (I don't know specifically what) that effectively slows down response.

I experienced a similar issue with slow typing speed in Office 365 Word. I edit a substantial number of Word and Excel documents for work and found the SkyDrive storage incredibly beneficial for working remotely.

I realized though that documents which are being edited from Skydrive, not a local copy, experience the slow typing speed issue.

The fix:   From word:  File, Options. Word Options has an advanced tab on the left labeled ‘advanced’. About 3/4 of the way down, a category for ‘Save’ options exists. The default setting has ‘Allow Background Saves’ checked. I uncheck this option and instead check ‘Always create backup copy’ and ‘Copy remotely stored files onto your computer, and update the remote file when saving’.

I assume that if you’re storing the files on Skydrive, or Dropbox, or web, or maybe even some external drive or flash memory this background save could be lagging and result in typing slowness. Either way, I changed the advanced options, and no more problem. Maybe it’ll work for you.

Excel didn’t have the option, and I usually save a local copy anyways due to the working file size.

*I run windows 7 with office 365 and windows surface pro with win 8 and office 365. 4gb memory each.

word 2013 is typing very slowly again

Answer

I have had the same problem on many computers and tried every solution I found on the web and nothing worked(registry changes, office settings(save display and more)).  As a test I copied the files from my Onedrive folder to the desktop and everything worked well - typing was as fast as office 2010 - the slow typing was a one drive problem.  Wanting both the benefits of Onedrive and the ability to type without lag I did the following:

1.Created a folder outside of Onedrive call Onedrive-Local.

2 Downloaded MS SyncToy to sync Onedrive-Local to the Onedrive folder which uploads to the cloud.

Now I only work out of the Onedrive-Local folder and things are fast.  The files get synced and I have access to them on the cloud.

In Office 2013 MS added a funky new UI feature called “Animation”. It is supposed to “smooth out”, or some such nonsense, cursor movement in the applications. I first noticed it in Excel 2013. I found it so annoying that that “feature” alone was enough to completely turn me off from using the whole Office 2013 bundle. Fortunately, or not (?), I found these fixes.

Just opened a new spread sheet, typed the nr 1 in cell A1 to A22, took me about 10 seconds.

Took excel 55 seconds to display, looks like slow motion. 

The article in the first link has a link to another article with a downloadable file that will make the change without you having to edit the registry manually

There’s an easier fix for the “rubber band” animations in Excel - just turn them off

1.    File menu,
2.    Options command
3.    Advanced option
4.    Scroll down to the Display section of the dialog,
5.    Turn ON the box for “Disable hardware graphics acceleration

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I have my Control Panel set up to display small icons (meaning I don’t get the big generalized groupings), and here’s the path in that kind of setup (Windows 7):

Press the Windows Button + [Pause/Break] to skip the next 2 steps

    or

        Open the Control Panel

        Choose System

Choose Advanced System Settings in the left hand column of choices on the next dialog

On the [Advanced] tab, click the {Settings...} button in the Performance section

Clear the checkbox next to the “Animate controls and elements inside windows” entry right at the top of the list

Click [OK] and close out all of the dialogs and the Control Panel.

That did it for me instantly without a reboot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4o6p12HL30

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I found an option that can be turned off when you’re typing over cells that have already been saved. Under options > advanced - (allow editing directly in cells) once I turned this off the lag stopped. 

*********** Registry Hacks *********

http://winsupersite.com/article/office-2013-beta2/office-2013-tip-disable-animations-143779- Reg hack

http://www.withinwindows.com/2012/07/21/disabling-animations-in-office-2013/ - Reg hack

To see the effect of disabling Office 2013 animation, you’ll need to reboot your computer. 

To reverse the effect, change the value of the added DWORD to its default of 0.

Alternate, related solution

I’m using Windows 8, and found a different solution there:

To disable Windows animations (this is secondary IMHO, but may be required):

•      On the metro start screen type Edit,
•     
•      “Edit system environment variables” is the first thing in second column on my search results, yours may vary
•      double click on it
•      provide the admin password to display the “System Properties” dialog
•      In the “Advanced” tab, Performance section, click on the “Settings...” button to display the “Performance Options” dialog
•      Personally, I prefer to select the “Adjust for Best Performance” option to get rid of the frilly “bells & whistles” that do not contribute to efficiency of my system.
•      At a minimum, confirm that the “Animate controls and elements inside Windows” option is disabled/unchecked.
•      Click on Apply
•      OK out
•      boot the computer

Under options > advanced > turn off  “allow editing directly in cells”

Here is another idea worth looking at :

I have had this problem also when authoring user guides.

Eventually I found that if I switched off the “Maintain compatibility” check box in the Save As dialog the problem disappeared.

Word may be scanning each element to make sure it maintains compatibility.

See this screen capture: https://www.dropbox.com/s/djupspb2572kd9i/Word%20Slow%20Typing.png

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2013_release-excel/need-to-turn-off-excel-animation/2d2a4a22-0f0a-4e02-aead-31b126765769

http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/39731-animations-turn-off-windows-8-a.html

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2013_release-excel/excel-2013-is-very-slow-in-loading-large-workbooks/3dc258b1-0d9b-492c-8ab8-2ba1df26fc7e?msgId=7f92ee0a-4a73-45ce-ac2a-80eb0e0ad1ae

Anita Oakley [MSFT] replied

Hello Jacques,

I just saw this, and I can explain it. In 2013 we went to a more secure algorithm across Office - not just in Excel. Excel 2013 uses SHA-512. It makes only milliseconds of difference with one call, but in those cases where code runs, protecting and unprotecting many sheets, it all adds up to a terrible performance issue.

Because it is considered a security risk to modify that, all request for a change have been turned down. The development team will never do anything to make Office less secure. See http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/office-2013-known-issues-HA102919019.aspx for an explanation from the development team.

Thanks, Anita

I changed the recommended settings & have a single coloumn of 994,148 unformatted data it didn’t help.

BTW - I can do it on my older 2010 excel running on Windows 7 Professional.

BINGO! I found the solution went to File- Account - Office Updates & appended.

There must have been a patch undocumented but I can sort a million rows.

http://ricbret.wordpress.com/2013/01/

The short form instructions are:

Go into Home tabl > Options command > Customize Ribbon option. Select the tab and Rename it.  Add a single space before or after the existing name and change the required upper case letters to lower case. OK out of the dialog.