What you're seeing is more likely to be result of the number of pages you're creating and the repagination overheads that imposes. Try working in draft layout view and disabling background pagination.

Nonetheless, you cannot reasonably expect Word to work as quickly with such lengthy documents as with short ones. And, if you think Word is slow, perhaps you should compare its performance with other word-processing & text-editing programs (e.g. Notepad, Wordpad)...

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

My apologies, but did you read my post, or just the title? What you have mentioned, both times, is stuff I already addressed in my original post.

1. I do not have 7,000 paragraphs, as in your example, but over 700,000 paragraphs.

2. Word handles documents of this size (cca 4MB) quite easily, if they are in a more normal layout. What -seems- to me is the difficulty with these docs is that each line is a separate paragraph.

3. I already HAVE tried other text editors, including specifically one of the ones you mention, Notepad++. The same text that Word chokes on, Notepad++ opens instantly, finds instantly, and resaves instantly, despite the file size being about twice the size of the Word format (likely due to Word's compression of the .docx format). So does PsPad. I did not try WordPad.

Background pagination is already turned off, and I did try various views - no difference.