Is there a way to turn off Word Count

[DataJuggler]

Word 2013 displays the Word Count automatically in the status bar.



This was fine until I got to 20,000 + words in my novel, now I type a line, wait 3 seconds for the text to display because I think Word is busing counting words.

Thank you

[macropod]

The delay has nothing to do with the word counting but, more likely, with background repagination. Switching to draft view and switching off background repagination should restore performance, as may checking the 'show picture placeholders' option. The latter spares Word the computational effort to redraw graphics in the document - but also means you'll only be able to see where they are, not what they contain. Another source of performance degradation is having large tables in the document.

[DataJuggler]

There are no graphics in my document, how do I turn the pagination off?

Sorry I am not a Word Guru, is that in Options?

[macropod]

After switching to Draft view, go to File|Options|Advanced>General, then uncheck 'Enable background repagination'.

PS: I assume you're using Word 2013, as per the first line in your first post, not Word 2003 (as shown in your profile) - which isn't compatible with Windows 8.

[DataJuggler]

Thank you, I found the Enable background Pagination check box, but Word is still horribly slow.

I am having to put Part 2 in a second document just to be productive.

Any other ideas of the slowdown, I just want to type and see what I type;

It takes 5 seconds or more for text I type to show up.

[macropod]

20,000 words for a Word document is trivial (Word 2003 can handle 32Mb of text, plus graphics, etc.). Perhaps your Office installation has a fault, or your document has some kind of corruption.

Try repairing the Word installation (via Help|Detect & Repair).

Corrupt documents can often be 'repaired' by inserting a new, empty, paragraph at the very end, copying everything except that new paragraph to a new document based on the same template (headers & footers may need to be copied separately), closing the old document and saving the new one over it.

[DataJuggler]

I did something where I turned off Track Changes, and that actually sped it up.

And it is Word 2013, I haven't used Word 2003 in a decade.

[macropod]

If 'Track Changes' is On, it should say so on Word's Status Bar. Clicking where it says that turns 'Track Changes' on/off. If it's not showing there, right-click on the status bar and choose that (and any other options you'd like to appear there).