It’s not that usual a phenomenon but sometimes Word stops being responsive, you can type a letter only to see it on screen after a second or so. That second actually feels like a whole eternity! The reason can be some option, or document corruption, or just a mystery!, as is often the case with Windows and Microsoft.

I tried to change some options, I didn’t have any pictures at all, the document was not even that large, only 170 pages. It had a lot of footnotes, but other documents of mine are much heavier with 5 times these footnotes, without a problem.

Instead of trying to figure out the great Unknown of Microsoft, I just made an experiment, I saved the document in the previous, doc, format, and the miracle occurred! I closed the document (perhaps this was not necessary) and when I reopened it, this time as doc and not docx, everything was as snappy as ever! Thus, if you face the same problem try first this simple and fast method, save your document as doc instead of docx, or if you face problem with a doc file, save it as docx, and see if your problem is solved.

Now, as a second experiment, I re-saved my newly “converted” doc again as docx to see if the problem reappears. Well, yes! The problem reappeared. Therefore I deleted forever the docx version and I kept working with the doc.