Word – Large document is sluggish and its pictures not visible in Web Layout

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I recently upgraded Office from 2010 to 2013. I have a large (700 pages) and complex document that contains text and pictures (inserted as In-Line With Text). The document has two problems:

1) Pictures are no longer visible in Word 2013. I noticed that if I change the view from Web Layout (which is the most suitable view for this particular document) to Print Layout, then the pictures become visible. The following workarounds did not help:
– Changing the position/wrapping of the pictures (which are clickable elements, if all white)
– using the "convert to latest document format"option (the document is right now in 2013 docx format)

2) In addition, Word reacts very slowly when I edit this document; all actions are very sluggish, with a delay of about 2 seconds, which is frustrating. The following are causes that I've ruled out, or workarounds that don't help for this problem:

  • PC performance: same problems affect this doc when opened on other PCs, with other Windows and Word versions
  • deleting contents from it till the document remains very small doesn't help
  • copy and paste everything into a new document doesn't help
  • save as another document (still docx format, or word 2003 DOC format; maitaining compatibility or not) doesn't help

The only workarounds that help (speed of operation becomes normal) are:
– deleting most of the contents of the document reduces the sluggishness
– viewing the document in Print Layout somewhat reduces the sluggishness

Any suggestions what I can try to get rid of these 2 problems – which seem to be related – for my document?

Best Answer

I too had this problem with a large document - Word 2013 was sluggish and not displaying pictures in web layout. The document was about 8 MB and 900 pages.

After some investigation I concluded this is a deficiency in Word's rendering of web layout.

For the record:

  1. Various of ways of 'tidying up' the document had no effect (saving to rtf format and opening the rtf file; opening and saving in LibreOffice as docx and opening the docx file; repeating but using odt format; copying without the final pargraph mark; etc)
  2. LibreOffice, although sluggish, was able to render the document in web layout
  3. Using the old doc format allowed Word to render OK
  4. Images display correctly near the start of the document
  5. Splitting the document into subdocuments and a master shows the same problem

The clincher for me was discovering that the same picture inserted at successive locations rendered squashed up and then not at all. Here's a screenshot from the place in the document where things go wrong.

enter image description here

So there is a point in the document beyond which images do not render, as though a limit has been reached and an attempt is made to render the image by squashing it vertically. The limit varies with the pane size for displaying the document e.g. if the navigation pane is displayed the limit on image displaying is moved up the document.

This is a bug in Word's image rendering in Web Layout of the later file format.

In my case, since I wanted to use Word rather than switch to LibreOffice, and use docx rather than doc format, I split the document into several separate smaller documents; these display images OK although are a little inconvenient.

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