MS Word saves slow--upgrade hardware?

[shmu26]

My long MS Word documents save slowly. They have only text, no graphics and no complicated formatting.
So when I write, I make a new file for every chapter, that way it saves pretty much instantly. But I would like to be able to write a whole book in one file.

Question: Is this just the way Word is, or will a hardware upgrade improve speed?
I don't think it is a problem with my present Office installation, because I have had the same issue with previous versions of Office as well.

I am running Office pro 2013, 32 bit, on Windows pro 8.1, 32 bit.

Pentium dual core processor
SATA II
4 gb of Ram, DDR3

WIndows, Office, and the relevant Word docs are running on a SSD.

If I need a better CPU, please advice what to look for: i-3? i-5? barking up the wrong tree?

PS I found this interesting tidbit on what's involved when Word saves a doc. There's more to it than meets the eye:

It should come as no surprise that there's very little I/O involved in simple tasks like typing. Most of the activity represented in this trace occurs when we open Microsoft Word and save our document. Actually, the latter is far more storage-intensive than you might think. We spent about 18 minutes to transcribe three pages worth of text from a CNN article. The end result was a Word document only 16 KB in size. However, the act of saving actually involves reading more than 100 MB and writing 20 MB.

I/O Trends:

 

[GrimzardTech]

why not download an older version of ms word, preferably 2003, your hardware should be enough to save instantly but downgrading will rule out the hardware side of things, could be bugs???

 

[shmu26]

I don't think it's bugs because even after reinstalling, I have always had this same issue. I've been living with it for years.

I am starting to think that it is because Word needs to read a lot of data.
Even a small Word file reads more than 100 MB during the act of saving. So a fifty-page doc might require considerable reading!

 

[GrimzardTech]

keep in mind the speed of hard drive rate, extremely fast to read and right, including sata 2s but like I said you should download MS Word 2003 to see if its a problem with your hardware. Once its downloaded open up your "chapters" and copy and paste it into one whole document and see how fast it is to save.

 

[shmu26]

thanks. I guess that is the sensible thing to do...

 

[GrimzardTech]

sure is

 

[hang-the-9]

With your hardware, things should work smoothly for Word, especially with an SSD drive. Exactly how slowly does it save and how large is the document? Do you have anything else working while it's saving like a backup?

Another option may be to use OpenOffice or LibreOffice, they are free and have a similar look and feel to Word.

 

[shmu26]

okay, I picked a really long word doc, just to push the point.
it is 1253 KB
571 pages

after typing a few words, it took 16 seconds to save. Office 2013.

I have nothing else to speak of going on in the background. I have gmail open in chrome, and a few light apps. no heavy duty processes going on.

 

[hang-the-9]

571 page is pretty big, although the overall size is not big, the page amount is probably what is causing the issues. I have to say I have not worked with long documents like that so can't say from experience how long is normal for this.

Have you tried moving the document to another computer and seeing how long it took to save? You may also be saving a version copy of it for recovery at the same time.

 

[shmu26]

okay, I wouldn't have expected this, but... I am now experimenting with saving my current Word docs in the cloud, in OneDrive, and opening them in Word on my own PC. With short docs, it takes a little longer to upload to the cloud than it would to save them locally. But with long docs, it takes the same amount of time. So it makes it quite workable with long docs. Right now, this seems to be a solution.

OneDrive then syncs the docs back onto my PC in a matter of seconds, so I have an up to date local copy.

 

[The Real Jaydax]

I've just changed from Office 2010 to Office 2013 and immediately encountered a slow saving problem.
Using a 1.51Mb document which has 500 pages, large graphics, headers, footers and footnotes I found the following:
Saved in Word 2010 - 20 seconds
Saved in compatability mode in 2013 - 20 seconds
Converted to a Word 2013 document - 150 seconds
Entire document copied and pasted into a 2013 document - 33 seconds
Turn off autosaving - 6 seconds

All saves were made to a local hard drive. It seems Word 2013 is slightly slower but it's worth it since the Office 365 deal is good - you get the latest full Office suite at a relatively painless monthly price.

 

[John Chapman]

An extra note now that Word 2016 is here.
Exactly the same problem has re-occurred. A document saved in Word 2013 and then resaved in Word 2016 takes ages to save. I timed a 300 page document, text only but with comments embedded. It took 154 seconds to save in Word 2016.
The cure is exactly the same.There is a problem though. Before you do this make sure you use the 'review' tab to accept all changes. If you don't do that you may find your new version has mistakes which have been corrected back in the document as well as the corrections! Once you've done that copy the entire document and paste it into a blank document then save that.
After doing this the new Word 2016 document I created took 12 seconds to save.

 

[rayw88]

An extra note now that Word 2016 is here.
Exactly the same problem has re-occurred. A document saved in Word 2013 and then resaved in Word 2016 takes ages to save. I timed a 300 page document, text only but with comments embedded. It took 154 seconds to save in Word 2016.
The cure is exactly the same.There is a problem though. Before you do this make sure you use the 'review' tab to accept all changes. If you don't do that you may find your new version has mistakes which have been corrected back in the document as well as the corrections! Once you've done that copy the entire document and paste it into a blank document then save that.
After doing this the new Word 2016 document I created took 12 seconds to save.

Seems to work for me! Thanks so much!! Too bad to lose tracking of changes though...
(I meant to upvote your solution-but it seems I'm incompetent, the site isn't allowing me to)

 

[soh kim lon]

Hi there,

This is what I have been doing and it seems to help. I would make sure that my mouse is completely stationary before I save. Saving would also be fast if I do not have the mouse connected. Works every time. Strange but it works.

Hope this works for you too.

Cheers !

My long MS Word documents save slowly. They have only text, no graphics and no complicated formatting.
So when I write, I make a new file for every chapter, that way it saves pretty much instantly. But I would like to be able to write a whole book in one file.

Question: Is this just the way Word is, or will a hardware upgrade improve speed?
I don't think it is a problem with my present Office installation, because I have had the same issue with previous versions of Office as well.

I am running Office pro 2013, 32 bit, on Windows pro 8.1, 32 bit.

Pentium dual core processor
SATA II
4 gb of Ram, DDR3

WIndows, Office, and the relevant Word docs are running on a SSD.

If I need a better CPU, please advice what to look for: i-3? i-5? barking up the wrong tree?

PS I found this interesting tidbit on what's involved when Word saves a doc. There's more to it than meets the eye:

It should come as no surprise that there's very little I/O involved in simple tasks like typing. Most of the activity represented in this trace occurs when we open Microsoft Word and save our document. Actually, the latter is far more storage-intensive than you might think. We spent about 18 minutes to transcribe three pages worth of text from a CNN article. The end result was a Word document only 16 KB in size. However, the act of saving actually involves reading more than 100 MB and writing 20 MB.

I/O Trends: