Word: Very slow to load and respond. Solved.
April 21, 2011Word 2007 — and now Word 2010 — on my Vista laptop has often been very slow to load a document and to respond to a document command (like Save). I’ve been blaming Vista…
But when I started to edit a 300+ page Word 2010 document on my Vista laptop, the unresponsiveness was going to be a huge productivity drain. So off to Google to see if there was an answer to this problem. And there is! And it’s not related to Vista at all, but to how a Word document interacts with the default printer. If the default printer is a networked printer, then there can be response issues.
In my case, the default printer is not only a networked printer, but when I opened this 300+ page document, the printer was turned off (it was a Sunday and I don’t use the printer all the time, especially on weekends).
After following the advice of people in this forum thread, I changed my default printer on the Vista laptop to Adobe PDF (Microsoft EPS works well too, I believe). And guess what? The document responded beautifully! No more achingly long Not responding messages in the Word 2010 title bar; no more watching the ‘spinning wheel of death’ (as I like to call it) while waiting and waiting for the Word document to respond because it was trying to talk to my network printer.
Brilliant.
But I have to question WHY Microsoft still ties things like Word documents so closely to the default printer. Most of us have many ‘printers’ listed these days — many of which aren’t even printers, but instead are printer drivers. If a network printer is set as the default and it can’t find it, then why don’t we get a message to tell us to change to another printer driver so we can work in a fully responsive document?
[Link last checked April 2011]
Exactly the same happened to me. Win 7, Word 2010, networked printer. Changed to CutePDF as the defualt and Bam! up it came.
many thanks
This didn’t work for me at all
Ultimate thanks, you saved my day.
Sort of helped – still lagging though.
Worked like a charm. For me the big problem occurred when selecting the TOC. Word would just start spinning its wheels for an annoying eternity [30 seconds]. Another Microsoft Mystery solved!
Worked like a magic wand which I was searching for quite some time !!. Thanks a lot
Well when I would click on MS Word 7, it would take almost 2 minutes to open! So I changed my networked default printer to the Microsoft XPS Writer and man my word opens like in 2 seconds flat! I dont understand what the printer has to do with opening a program??? Thanks for the tip.
Thanks for the tips. My default printer was my home printer, but I’m at work and don’t have access to it. I set my default printer to Microsoft XPS Writer and – blammo – updating my table of contents in Word now takes < 1 second. Sweet!
work for me . thank you for your support
Fantastic… I was trying to shrink, text wrap and move lots of photos within a document… it was taking an age. This solution worked like a dream! I set my printer to Microsoft XPS and everything works as it should with no delays at all. Many thanks!
“Word would just start spinning its wheels for an annoying eternity [30 seconds]”
The damned will be happy to learn that their eternity of torment and punishment is only going to last 30 seconds!
Thank you. This worked for me. Microsoft needs to do something to rectify this issue as Word was unusable otherwise.