Slow word document

Question

I have a word file in Hebrew with many footnotes that takes forever to load, and every step to edit can take a few minutes, even just to click on menu items from the ribbon. I do not have this issue with other Word files, and have had this issue with this file on multiple computers. What is causing this? What can I do about it?

Answer 1

Hello Bourbon Breath,

Welcome to the Microsoft Community.

I understand that you are experiencing extremely slow loading and editing of a Hebrew Word document containing a large number of footnotes, and even a delay when clicking on a menu item in the ribbon. This is indeed agonizing.

Since you mentioned that no other Word document has the same problem, and that the problem persists when the document is opened on another computer. This situation has basically determined that the problem is related to the complexity of the document, formatting, or the way Word itself handles it. Because your document contains a large number of footnotes and uses Hebrew (a language written from right to left), Word may need more resources to handle these special formatting and layout. In addition, there may be some hidden formatting issues or corrupted content in the document, all of which can lead to performance degradation.

I suggest you refer to the following suggestions:

You can try to save the document as a new file format, such as “.docx” (if it is not currently in this format), which can sometimes fix potential problems in the document. Second, you can try to reduce the complexity of the formatting in the document, for example by merging or simplifying styles, or moving some of the footnotes into the body of the document (if this is feasible). In addition, you can find and remove hidden metadata or redundant information from your document by going to File > Info > Inspect Document, which may significantly improve the document's This may significantly improve document loading speed.

If these methods still don't solve the problem, you might consider copying the document in sections into a new Word document and step-by-step checking to see if there is a specific part of the document that is causing the performance problem.

If the problem persists after the above troubleshooting, it may be related to a language-specific compatibility issue. You may consider reporting this issue to the Microsoft team through Word's feedback feature.

• In Word, click File -> Feedback.

Your feedback will be submitted directly to Microsoft's engineering team to help us further optimize Word's support for specific languages such as Hebrew.

Best regards,

Ian - MSFT | Microsoft Community Support Specialist