Performance Degradation after Inserting Footnotes in Cells within a Table

Question

For about the last month or so I have been seeing very significant performance degradation after inserting footnotes in cells within a table in Microsoft Word 16 (Office 365).  However, the problem seems to be in some way specific to the Microsoft Surface hardware.  I have a Microsoft Surface Pro 1 and a Microsoft Surface Book with Performance Base, and both of these have the issue 100% of the time.  I also have an a 7 year old HP dv6t laptop and a newer high-end desktop that I built from components, and the problem cannot be seen at all on either of these.  All systems are running Windows 10 Professional, Build 14393, except the Surface Book with Performance Base, which recently upgraded itself to Windows 10 Professional, Build 15063 (i.e. the Creators Update).  However, note that the problem was equally evident on this latter system both before and after the upgrade.

The issue is easy to duplicate.  If you just create a new document in Word and insert a table with a large number of cells (e.g. 9 columns x 200 rows) and then try to insert footnotes in several of the cells, Word will become non-responsive.  The more footnotes you add, the more you see the message "Word is not responding".  When you do go back into cells following the insertion of the footnotes and begin to insert additional, new text, the appearance of the typed characters will significantly lag time when the keys are depressed.  Also, the bigger the table, the worse that the issue will become.

If anyone else is seeing this problem on their Surface hardware or has any ideas on the cause/resolution, their comments and thoughts would be appreciated.  This is really getting to the point at which it is causing me a real inconvenience.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You may get better performance if you turn off the table's 'automatically resize to fit contents' option.

It's also possible the document and/or the table itself has acquired some form of corruption.

Corrupt documents can often be 'repaired' by inserting a new, empty, paragraph at the very end, copying everything except that new paragraph to a new document based on the same template (headers & footers may need to be copied separately), closing the old document and saving the new one over it.

Similarly, corrupt tables (which the above process won't repair) can often be 'repaired' by:

• converting the tables to text and back again;

• cutting & pasting them to another document that you save the document in RTF format, which you then close then re-open before copying them back to the source document; or

• saving the document in RTF format, closing the document then re-opening it and re-saving in the doc(x) format.

Do note that some forms of table corruption can only be repaired by the first method.

Answer 2

Since my last posting on this problem, I have come upon some additional information related to the situation, so I thought it would be appropriate to add an update.

The most important new fact is that the problem I described is broader in scope than I first reported.  Not only am I seeing an issue when I try to add footnotes into cells within a table, but I also see the same problems when I try to edit the headers of the document containing the table or when I try to insert "comments" tied to text in the cells of the table.  As noted before, the problems seem to be tied to tables of a large size and only show up on my two Surface systems, while these problems do not show up on my two non-Surface computers.

My problems seems to be an expansion of another problem that I have found described here in the Microsoft Community.  This is a posting titled "MS Word 2016 Not Responding Esp. During Header/Footer Editing of Long Documents" by Amy382 on March 15, 2017.

After spending a lot of time trying to resolve this issue, I finally decided to try to just completely rebuild my Surface Pro I from scratch.  I did a complete fresh install of Windows 10, wiping out all files, and installing everything anew.  Once I was far enough along to reinstall Office 365, I did so, and restored a copy of one of the documents that was causing me problems.  There was no improvement whatsoever. The application performance of Word is as poor as it was prior to the reinstall.

I'm pretty much out of ideas.  If anyone else has any additional thoughts as to what else might be at play here, I'd be interested in hearing from them.

Answer 3

I did try this a few weeks ago on my Surface Book.  As I recall, there were two options.  For one you didn't  have to be connected to the Internet, but it could solve only a subset of issues.  The other option required Internet connectivity, but addressed a broader set of issues.  I selected this latter option, which I think just basically reinstalled Office 365.  In the end, it made no difference at all, so I did not bother to try to make this repair on my older Surface Pro I.

Bob

Answer 4

Have you tried repairing the Office installation on the Surface machines? On a PC, you'd do that via  Windows Control Panel > Programs > Programs & Features > Microsoft Office (version) > Change > Repair.

Answer 5

Paul, thank you for your reply and comments.  However, I think I am dealing with a different situation than document corruption here for a couple of reasons.

First, when I save the documents of concern here, I use Dropbox, and they are replicated to all four of my machines.  I can then load them and continue to edit them with no issues whatsoever on my two non-Surface machines, including adding more footnotes in the cells, etc.  There is absolutely no performance hit seen on either of these machines.  However, if I try the same on either of my Surface systems, the MS Word application will show that it is "not responding" with a sizable hit to CPU usage, as shown on the Resource Monitor. Given that one of my Surface systems is one of the brand new Surface Books with Performance Base, this should not have an issue with something that my 7 year old HP dv6t laptop can handle with ease.

Second, as I previously noted, the problem I am seeing will occur 100% of the time on my two Surface systems, when a new table is created of a sufficiently large size (e.g. 200 rows x 9 columns).  The table doesn't even have to be saved.  It will have the problem from the get-go.  Thus, corruption can't really figure in.

I would appreciate it if someone else who owns a Surface hardware product and uses Word 16 from Office 365, would see if they see the same issue when inserting several footnotes into cells in a newly created, large table.  I'm curious as to whether this is an overall product problem, or if it is something specific to the way I have my two systems configured (e.g. I use both the American English and the German proofing tools; not sure why that would affect anything, but it is something I have on my systems that not everyone would do).