All the odd problems seem to have descended on me at the same time ...!



I'm working with two or three documents that are hundreds of pages long ( F.Y.I., one is a book and the others are notes relating to it ). Over the last couple of days, it's started to be the case that there's a lag while I'm typing, i.e. I'll type three or four words and it will take a second or two to catch up and display them ( I'm a fairly fast typist, so this can be frustrating! ). It seems to take longer to do anything related to the documents in question, from opening them ( 30 seconds for the longest one, on an SSD drive ) to copying and pasting formats ( 10 to 15 seconds depending on what mood it's in ). Sometimes when doing the latter, it will even flicker between documents! It does do the copy-format, but you then have to go back to the document you were working on in the first place.

Obviously none of this actually stops me working on the documents in question, but it does make it hideously cumbersome. I've trawled the internet for solutions and so far not found one that either works or is viable. Any help or suggestions appreciated!

1. Save your document in the .docx format.
2. Use styles for most of your formatting.

• Importance of Styles in Word
• Basic Concepts of Microsoft Word - from Shauna Kelly
• Getting Started in Word by Suzanne Barnhill, MVP

Along with Charles' suggestions, I will add...

1. Work in draft view
2. Turn off 'spell check as you type'

__________________
Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Thank you for your suggestions. The document most affected ( which is to say, the one in which I've been most aware of this issue ) is already saved in .docx format. I very rarely ever use spell-check, and never 'as you type'. As regards using styles for formatting, I must confess I've never really played around with styles very much; but that apart, there are a lot of different formats within this document, and I suspect that setting each one up as a different style might prove even more cumbersome than just waiting the twenty or thirty seconds while it does it's thing each time. Which is not to say that I'm embracing the idea of waiting twenty or thirty seconds while it does it's thing each time ...!

I haven't tried working in draft view; I'll give that a go today and see if it helps.

The thing that occurs to me is that this problem has only reared it's head in the last week or so, which makes me wonder why ...?

Other than that, any and all other suggestions or thoughts still welcome, and I'll keep you posted as to developments.

In my experience, Revision Tracking is a resource hog and editing documents with lots of tracked revisions always slows down things.

If this is a recent problem then it could be related to something else. Like maybe if you changed your default printer around the time you started noticing the slowdown. Word continually repaginates based on a printer driver so that might be something 'non-Word' to investigate.

If you haven't kept the document clean with formatting largely done with styles then Word needs to do more processing to keep it WYSIWYG.

The spell as you type is on by default - if you wiggly red or blue lines under misspelt words then it is turned on.

__________________
Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia