Editing a Document with Many Pages

Hal has a very large document that he works with regularly. The document is just text, with no images, and contains about 2,700 pages. The file size of the document is not terribly large, being under 2 MB. However, opening and editing the document can be excruciatingly slow. For instance, editing a sentence or applying a style can take minutes to accomplish. Hal wonders how he can speed up working with this long document.

Actually, there are a good number of things you can do, each of which might contribute to working with the document faster. Let's look at each of them, in turn.

How Your Document is Saved

First, let's talk about your document. How old is it? If you have been working with it for a while (and by "a while" I mean years), I would try the following, checking after each task to see if it helps.

• Make sure you are saving your document on a local hard drive, not on a network drive or on a cloud drive such as OneDrive or DropBox.
• Use Save As to save the document under a new name.
• If the document is an old DOC format, save it in the current DOCX format.
• If the document is in the current DOCX format, save it in the older DOC format, get out of Word, get back into Word, load the DOC file, and save it under a new name in the current DOCX format.
• Save the document in RTF format, get out of Word, get back into Word, load the RTF file, and save it under a new name in the current DOCX format.

The reason that saving the document in different versions works is because it causes Word to, internally, "double check" pointers and references to make sure they are correct and as optimal as possible. This can then allow Word to work with the document faster.

What Your Document Contains

Now you may want to look at what is in your document. You mentioned that it was "just text" and contained no images, but you may want to check the following. (Because you said you had no images, I won't include any suggestions relative to them.)

• Does the document contain a lot of text boxes? (Text boxes are very similar to graphics. While you may not have images, with lots of text boxes, performance by Word is similar to having a lot of images.)
• Have you used Track Changes for a while with a lot of edits noted on the screen? (These can really slow things down. Just turning off Track Changes won't help; you'll want to resolve the changes as much as possible.)
• Does the document contain links to external sources, particularly on the Web or on network drives? These can slow down editing tremendously. (See https://wordribbon.tips.net/T000978 for how you can turn off updating external links when opening a document.)
• Does the document have a lot of footnotes or endnotes? These present more complex page layout challenges to Word, particularly if you are using footnotes and they are individually quite long.
• Does your document have a lot of line breaks and, especially, section breaks? These can affect pagination quite a bit and force Word to repaginate more often than it otherwise would.
• Does your document contain a lot of tables? There have been reports of a large number of tables causing sluggishness in the program. (What constitutes "a large number of tables" can vary greatly depending on other variables.)

A rule of thumb here is that there are many things that people view as "just text," but they aren't really. You can check to see what is "just text" by opening a new document, selecting everything from the old document, and using Paste Special in the new document to paste as text only. This can strip many of the "extras" that Word may be working with in the old document. You should realize that it will also remove any formatting in the pasted text, so that could present a huge task in getting the formatting right again.

Potential Document Corruption

It is possible that your document is corrupted or that it is showing the first signs of corruption. You can narrow down whether this is the case or not by determining if the problem is with a single document or with multiple documents. (If it is with multiple documents, chances are good that the problem isn't document corruption.)

It should also be noted that the various "saving" scenarios described in the first section of this tip may overcome any potential corruption in the document. If you think there may still be a problem, feel free to read on to help correct it.

The standard method to overcome document corruption is to copy the contents of the file (minus the last character in the file) to another document. This may work well with shorter documents, but isn't particularly practical with very long documents. Instead, copy "chunks" of your document to a new one by following these steps:

1. Open the corrupt document.
2. Create a brand new document.
3. Switch to the corrupt document.
4. Press Ctrl+Home to go to the beginning of the document.
5. Select a "chunk" of the document—perhaps 100 pages or so.
6. Press Ctrl+C. This copies the selected portion of the document to the Clipboard.
7. Switch to the new document (the one created in step 2).
8. Press Ctrl+V. The contents of the Clipboard are pasted into the blank document.
9. Repeat steps 5 through 8 with successive "chunks" of the document. Only when you are just about ready to copy the last part of the document should you continue with step 10.
10. Position the insertion point just before the last portion of the corrupt document.
11. Press Shift+Ctrl+End. This selects everything between the current insertion point and the end of the document.
12. Hold down the Shift key as you press the Left Arrow key. This makes sure that the very last character in the document (the ending paragraph mark) is not selected.
13. Press Ctrl+C. This copies the last portion of the document to the Clipboard.
14. Switch to the new document (the one created in step 2).
15. Press Ctrl+V. The contents of the Clipboard are pasted into the blank document.
16. Save the new document.
17. Close the document you suspect is corrupted.

Work with the new document for a while to see if the problems are corrected. (If the problems were related to document corruption, you should definitely see an improvement in responsiveness and less flakiness in Word's behavior.)

Modify Word's Configuration

You can also try these tasks, relative to how Word is configured. (After each of these suggestions I've tried to include a link to a WordTip that provides additional information relative to the suggestion.)

• Turn off background repagination. This stops the program from trying to repaginate every time you make an edit. (See https://wordribbon.tips.net/T005975.)
• Edit your document in Draft view. Only use Page Layout view on those few occasions when you need an approximation of what the finished document will look like. (See https://wordribbon.tips.net/T008142.)
• Get rid of styles that you don't really need. You may have a bunch of them in this category, particularly if you do a lot of copying and pasting from other documents. (See https://wordribbon.tips.net/T010225.)
• Stop Word from tracking your formatting changes. (See https://wordribbon.tips.net/T007834.)
• Turn off Click and Type. (See https://wordribbon.tips.net/T005999.)
• Turn off background saving. (See https://wordribbon.tips.net/T006106.)
• Turn off background printing. (See https://wordribbon.tips.net/T006697.)

While not specifically a configuration change, you may also want to check to see if you have any add-ins or background programs running. This may include any virus checkers. Turn them off and check to see if the document editing goes faster.

The general rule is that you want to turn off any configuration option that requires additional processing or any background processing. While these optional items can make your life easier when dealing with shorter documents, they can slow down working with very long documents.

Final Things to Check

If none of these things work, you may want to check out some things relative to your system. First, there are lots of things you can tweak in Windows, itself, to make sure it is functioning at peak performance. Honestly, you shouldn't have to poke and prod Windows if you are only having problems with the one document, but it doesn't hurt to make sure that things are in fine shape. You should be able to find information about how to optimize Windows in any good resource about using Windows.

You may also want to look at your hardware. How old is your computer? Does it have ample RAM? Is your hard drive nearly full? Is your hard drive one of the newer SSD drives?

If your hardware is found wanting and you cannot afford to upgrade it, you may want to look at breaking your document into several smaller documents—perhaps 4 or 5 documents of approximately equal length. You can then work with each document individually, and "put them back together" at a later point, if you need to.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (5138) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, Word in Microsoft 365, and 2021.