How do I improve performance on a long Word document? #M365AMA

In this episode, the #M365AMA panel discusses the following community question:

“Two weeks ago I ran into a snafu working on a 115 page legal document, which suddenly started to ”pause” each time I made a text entry or deleted text – during which time the blue circle/halo would swirl at the center of the screen … for a minimum of 5 minutes. During this swirling timeframe, all actions in any Office program would stop. If I pressed the ESC key or the CTRL+BREAK key, the screen would become transparent white. Once the “pause” ended, as soon as I resumed word processing the same thing would occur. Again & again & again. Prior to this happening, it appeared there was an Update to OFFICE 365 – where, for example, the tool bar now dropped a window to let me know that I was “Editing” the document, or “Reviewing” the document. After all this, Word finally errors out, telling me “We’re sorry, but Word has run into an error that is preventing it from working correctly. Word will need to be closed as a result. Would you like to like us to repair now?” which doesn’t seem to help.”

Check out the discussion here:

 

Participating in this discussion were:

• Christian Buckley @buckleyplanet 
• Shari Oswald  @shortcutshari
• Mike Nelson  @mikenelsonIO

Some relevant notes/links shared by the team:

• What is AutoSave? via Microsoft Support [https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/what-is-autosave-6d6bd723-ebfd-4e40-b5f6-ae6e8088f7a5]