Why does Word doc take so long to save

Ash_Pole

I have a Word doc full of text and a few pictures. It's 371 pages now and 11,000 KB. It takes 2 minutes to save it every time.
I'm on W10 on an SSD laptop now and it used to take this long on my old W7 laptop so it must be something to do with the file.
Should a file this size take take this long to save?

Neil_Jones

Well its 11 megabytes which is quite big for a Word document so it wouldn't be surprising.

Pictures you would probably do better in all honesty to link them in rather than embed them, as that is what will take the bulk of the space up.

neilmcl

Where exactly are you trying to save it? If you saving to a OneDrive location then perhaps this may explain it as it's not only saving the document but also backing it to the cloud.

Ash_Pole

neilmcl said:

Where exactly are you trying to save it? If you saving to a OneDrive location then perhaps this may explain it as it's not only saving the document but also backing it to the cloud.

I save it to a dropbox location, but if I save it direct to my C: drive it takes just as long.

Neil_Jones

Yes as I said above, take all the pictures out, and reinsert them as links.  File size will drop dramatically:

https://word.tips.net/T000396_Understanding_Graphic_Linking.html

This does of course mean you can't just email the document to somebody else and have them see the pictures, but you can save as PDF and email that.

WaywardDriver

Compressing pictures might help, see Reduce the file size of a picture in Microsoft Office - Office Support

IvanOpinion

Do you have any complex indexing, table of contents etc?  I just tried a document of similar size (about 12MB) and 700pages and on my system (which also has SSDs) it appeared after about 5 seconds but took about 22 seconds to fully load.