Large document has become sluggish to edit

Same problem on windows 10 office 365 with 8mb ram and no pictures - we are talking of 600 page contracts that up till October last year, scrolled and edited fine on very ordinary windows surface pc's. Something has made things much worse. I have repaired and reinstalled office to no effect, because the issue is worse on some pcs than others, and the difference is not RAM.

Yes, it appears that formatting could be the issue.  But it shouldn't be.

How do you do your formatting? Do you primarily use styles?  Or do you do a LOT of manual formatting, applying bold/italics/fonts/sizes directly to lots of text using the ribbon?

In case it is file corruption, here are some links on techniques to fix corruption that you can give a try:

Document Corruption

**http://www.addbalance.com/usersguide/document\_corruption.htm******

Here is a collection of links from **socrtwo** who has done a lot of work on document corruption

**http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office\_2010-word/the-file-docx-cannot-be-opened-because-there-are/15ab9209-9936-4b2d-907e-b614590553be**

See this list of resources. I’m working on improved software for recovering from Word corruption.

• http://godskingsandheroes.info/software/index.htm#3 - command line extractor of corrupt and healthy text from MS Office docx, xlsx and pptx. Coded for me by CCY and using the same Delphi code as the GUI Corrupt Office 2007 Extractor found on my SourceForge page: http://wayback.archive.org/web/20120709021353/http://www.ccyjchk.com/catalog/
• http://silvercoders.com/en/products/doctotext/ - command line program used by several of my GUI programs which has a feature for recovering text from corrupt docx, xlsx, pptx, odt, ods and odp files (the last three being the Open Office extensioned files).
• http://docx2txt.sourceforge.net/ - Perl based solution that some of my programs use.
• http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/office-open-xml-file-docx-cannot-opened-t3714016.html - member chrima mentions an algorithm for correcting Table of Content errors, that used to appear I think in Word 2007 before one of the Office Services Packs fixed it. If anybody knows that the TOC document.xml errors are still occurring let me know. In the same thread, member Ben3DX offers some Python code to automate the process. I will try to implement both their ideas in my code.
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2528942 - Microsoft Mr. Fixit that is supposed to be fixed by Office 2010 SP1. If you are getting “The name in the end tag of the element must match the element type in the start tag.” and your Word document has math formulas, this might fix it (or update to Office 2010 SP1).
• http://www.wordarticles.com/temp/Rebuilder.dotm  - this free Word Add-in will fix issues with some but maybe not all math papers experiencing the “end tag of the element must match the element type in the start tag” error.
• http://runferalrun.wordpress.com/2012/08/31/the-name-in-the-end-tag-of-the-element-word-2010-error/ - fixing the “The name in the end tag of the element must match the element type in the start tag.” document.xml by hand.
• http://blogs.technet.com/b/wordonenotesupport/archive/2011/03/24/error-when-opening-a-word-2007-or-2010-document.aspx - for fixing repeating errors of the “The name in the end tag of the element must match the element type in the start tag.” variety, which may be mainly documents with math formulas in them.
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2817583 - probably the hotfix most relevant to users with “Unspecified error Location: Part/word/document.xml,Line:2, Column: 0” errors. These are apparently sometimes or always papers with math formulas in them as well. The download button is up at the top of the page.
• http://sourceforge.net/users/socrtwo22 - the list of my free software, many of which will recover text and some try formatting too. The text extraction abilities are stronger than the various software’s ability recover text and formatting. The programs that recover formatting use the overkill method of truncating at the first XML error, a method I’m moving past now. Some of the GUI programs use the command line text extractors on their back ends.
• http://free-data-recovery.blogspot.com/2012/03/secrets-of-recovering-corrupt-office.html - My blog post that details how to do truncation and XML end tag fixing on the document.xml file. This method is efficient only when the first XML error is the beginning of a truncated document.xml due to zip corruption or some other XML corruption which corrupts the XML beyond recovery starting at the error location. It tells you how to use xmllint to add the correct XML tags automatically to truncated XML files. Theoretically xmllint is supposed to fix bad XML with some intelligence say even if your XML has correct ending tags and is corrupt somewhere in the middle, however in practice it may be only useful for adding correct ending tags.
• http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2010-word/i-got-an-error-saying-the-file-group-6-mini/5b553957-dae7-4fbd-b1f5-13606d9f035f - there are Word MVPs who are recovering corrupt Word files on request there. I recover Word files too but I charge $22 :-). There are probably other threads in Microsoft communities bulletin boards where free recovery is being offered, search here. I refund $17 if the recovery is unsuccessful and work usual with a 2-5 hour turnaround: http://saveofficedata.com/contact.htm.
• http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/office/en-US/11c6f40d-e229-428a-9d76-cf0e5be3b8c8/corrupted-word-2007-file-unspecified-error - has a nice algorithm by Daniel “3ICE” Berezvai, for recovering from document.xml errors. Daniel is another nice tech who sometime repairs document.xml files upon request.
• http://onlinerecovery.munsoft.com/ - they will let you recover 10 files for free if you mention their name and link from Facebook, Twitter or your blog. Their recovery algorithm works quite well.
• https://online.officerecovery.com/ - Recoveronix’ Online File Recovery. One of the oldest names in the business is kindly offering a free recovery for users who go through a Demo recovery and then use the coupon code “S2SERVICES” (the name of my business :-) until Nov. 1, 2013. Often works.
• http://www.repairmyword.com/ - freeware text extractor that works with corrupt doc files only.
• On the subject of doc files, there is also an obscure free Microsoft tool described in a white paper here:http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=2096 and downloadable here:http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=158791. It has an automatic repair feature that supposedly works for recovering some corrupt doc, xls and ppt files.
• http://wayback.archive.org/web/20030808203530/http://www.microsystems.com/exp_Fixing_Broken_Word_Documents.htm - lengthy article on how to fix Word doc files particularly those imported from WordPerfect I think.

Additional Written Resource s

Q87856 - Trouble shooting Damaged Documents in Word 97 for Windows (Knowledge Base)

How to trouble shoot damaged documents in Word 2007 and in Word 2010 (Knowledge Base)

*How can I recover a corrupt document and why did it become corrupt?* MVP Dave Rado on the MVP FAQ site.

Fixing Broken Word Documents by Kate Evert at Microsystems

Microsoft Word 2010 Bible by Herb Tyson, MVP

Potential Causes of DOCX Corruption - Problems saving to USB Devices

http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wordcreate/thread/73a1e1b0-e6cf-43b8-a97f-0b01b5c33da3/

http://www.addbalance.com/usersguide/document\_corruption.htm

• Adbalance Legal Users Guide – Corruption chapter

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=2032681

• Managing and Sharing Office 2013 Files

Determining if a Document is Corrupt

**http://word.tips.net/T003798\_Determining\_if\_a\_Document\_is\_Corrupt.html******

Summary: Think you might have a corrupt document? There is no easy way to tell if this is the case, but there are some things you can do to try to fix the document. (This tip works with Microsoft Word 2007.)

TROUBLE SHOOTING WORD AND DOC CORRUPTION

To learn more information on this topic (and there is quite a bit), refer to the following page at the Word MVP site: http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/AppErrors/CorruptDoc.htm

http://lounge.windowssecrets.com/index.php?s=965c08f05aa3e2e40cd935247136dfaa&showtopic=197827                 Systematic Approach to Behavioral Problems in Word (Word 97/2000) (Woody’s Lounge)

Note: While the steps below work in Word 2002 & 2003, each of these versions has a trouble shooting tool that automates the process (except for deleting temp files). You can read about & download the 2002 Support Template and 2003 Support Template. My thanks to Rebel for pointing out these tools.

Document Rescue: Errors on Open – flow chart

How to trouble shoot damaged documents in Word 2007 and in Word 2010

**http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918429******

Article ID: 918429 - Last Review: May 20, 2010 - Revision: 6.0

Recovering Corrupt Document Files with StarOffice

**http://word.tips.net/T001513\_Recovering\_Corrupt\_Document\_Files\_with\_StarOffice.html******

Summary: A possibility to try if you have a corrupt document.

It is interesting that Sun StarOffice 5.2 read the corrupted Word file without problem, although one section of text was not recoverable. Saving the file from StarOffice as a Word document file and loading it back into Word recovered the situation.

Corrupt / Damaged DOCX file reader

**http://www.saveofficedata.com/******

This site has several tools for reading damage Office files.

DOCX format is based on ZIP format.  If the ZIP format document is corrupt and cannot be opened in Word 2007, this tool will extract text.

Namosofts Office Doc recovery

**http://www.pr-inside.com/namosofts-launched-its-new-production-namosofts-r2853421.htm******

**http://www.namosofts.com/products/file\_recovery.html******

10+ ways to recover a corrupted Word document

**http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=952&tag=nl.e056******

Few computer experiences are worse than having a Word document blow up on you. But before you resign yourself to losing the document contents, check out these techniques for salvaging your text.

If you’ve ever had an important document get corrupted, you know the despair that sets in. You’ve lost critical information and/or countless hours of work - or so it appears. But hang on: You may not have to accept data loss. Here are some things you can try when you’re dealing with a corrupted Word document.

First of all, great support, thank you very much.

A similarly-sized (by word count) document consisting of random text generated as you suggested had significantly less lag when doing text operations. The file size was, however, only ~22kB, i.e. about 1000 times smaller than the original file.

When I saved the original file as RTF and then back to DOCX, it didn't help with the sluggishness at all.

Rather than pictures or amount of text, could it be the rich *formatting* of the text in the original doc that is contributing to the problem? Otherwise, is there anything else I can try?