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

Hi,

Thank you for posting in Microsoft Community.

 

I will assist you in resolving the issue working with the Word application.

 

Please follow these steps and check if it helps:

 

Method 1:

 

Try Working in Word safe and check if it helps. To know how to start Word in Safe mode, follow the steps below.

 

Press the ‘Windows + R’ key on the keyboard > Copy and paste the following command line in the ‘Open’ box and click Ok.

 

Winword /safe

 

If this helps, disable the add-ins as suggested in the Section ‘Delete the COM add-ins registry keys’ from this article.

 

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/921541

 

Method 2:

 

If the issue persists, repair the Office and check if it helps:

 

Go to Start Screen and type > Control > Now Click on Settings > Select Control Panel > Click on Programs and Features > Search for Office > Click on it and select Change > Choose ‘Repair’.

 

 

Method 3:

 

 

If you still face the issue, then check if any other software is conflicting with the Word application by starting the computer in the Clean Boot mode as suggested in this article:

 

 

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929135

 

 

Note: After the troubleshooting, restart the computer in Normal mode.

 

 

 

Hope this helps to resolve the issue. If you need any assistance, reply to us.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for your quick response! Unfortunately I am on buisness travels at the moment which is why I won't be able to test these solutions until this weekend. I will however respond with results as soon as I have followed your instructions (probably Saturday).

Hi,

I had time to test all of the above recommendations. Unfortunately none of them solved the problem. I am pretty sure that the problem isn't based on my system configuration. It is a clean install of Windows 8.

On top of that it got worse: I am now facing at least 20 seconds saving time and 3 seconds "text pasting" time... Word is practically useless like this.

Could you please test this behaviour with a large file on your system?

Thank you very much!

I found out that this does not happen with every "long" Word document. If I create a new document with a long text, everything works fine.

I also tried:

• Copying the complete text out of this document and pasting it including it's style sheets into a new .docx --> same problem
• Deleting all footnotes --> same problem
• Deleting all style sheets and using "Standard-Style Sheet" for the complete text --> same problem
• Deleting all style sheets --> same problem
• Copying the complete text and pasting it as plane text (without style sheets and footnotes) into a new document --> works fine
  

That means that I can only solve the problem by copying the whole text into a new document and reformatting every single word, retyping every single footnote. That is unacceptable. Keep in mind that the same document works fine in Word 2010. So there must be a problem with Word 2013. By the way: I also tried this with othe long documents that fulfill the following criteria:

> 100 pages

> 300 footnotes

> extensive style sheets

several section breaks

Again: Even if I delete all style sheets, sections breaks, footnotes, headers and format the whole text as plane Standard Text, saving and pasting is still as slow as before. Only if I copy and paste the whole text as plane text into a new document, the problem disappears.

Any ideas?

What you describe suggests section-level corruption as a possible cause. You don't have to delete footnotes, but you should try copying the document, section by section, making sure to omit each section break and also the final paragraph mark of the document (the latter mark contains section formatting for the last section of a document, or for the only section in a document without section breaks). For more on this, see http://word.mvps.org/faqs/apperrors/corruptdoc.htm.

First of all thank you for your help.

Unfortunately this wasn't the problem. I tried as you suggested and copied each section without the final paragraph mark into a ne document. However the problem remained: Pasting and Saving as slow as ever...

Anymore ideas on this?

The only way to locate the damaged part of the document is to proceed as follows: Make a copy of the document. Divide it into two halves and see which half has the problem. Split the problem half a second time, etc., until you have isolated the damaged part.

Thanks, Stefan, but I already tried that - the thing is:

If I split the document in halfs (p 1-50 and p 51-102) both halfs show the same problem although they both are slightly faster. If I split both halfs into 4 parts the speed improves again for all 4 documents. If I split those again, all remaining 8 documents (they have only about 10 to 15 pages and <70 KB each by now) save with a normal speed.

That clearly suggests that there is no "damaged part" at all in this document but Word 2013 can't handle it the way it should as soon as it get's large... Also the speed get's worse with the increasing length of the file not with the increaseing size (it doesn't get worse if I add a picture however it does if I add more pages).

If I didn't know better I'd say the problem lies within the style sheets. But as already said: Even if I delete all custom style sheets, there is no improvement...

Is there anything else that Word might have trouble with?

Hmm, you said earlier that you had tested with other long documents, without running into the issue. The question seems to remain: What is specific to the problem document?

Sorry, that was a misunderstanding:

I meant that I didn't run into problems with other documents, that only had plain text in them. However I had similar problems with other documents that matched the following criteria:

long (>50 pages)
custom style sheets
footnotes

It's easily reproduceable with other documents (I tested 3 different documents from different sources)