Mac Word help!!

Morning all,

I’m in the final throws of completing my PhD thesis and having real issues with Word on my MacBook air. It’s a big file around 10MB with 100k words but it’s got really really laggy. I’ve been using Mendeley cite add in to sort all my references and suspect that may be the issue. Autosave is on also. Watching the Mac performance monitor CPU and Memory are being fried by word. Does anyone have any help or ideas?

I’m using most recent OS and Word update.  Not had this issue before with big documents, but can’t ditch Mendeley as that controls all of the hundreds of refs!

Thanks!!!!

Chris

Not a Mac person, but i assume you have tried it with the Macbook on mains power? as that might reduce performance throttling?

Thanks Alan,

Same performance on mains and battery. I wonder whether it’s a recent Mendeley update as haven’t experienced it being this slow previously using word and Mendeley.

Thanks

Can’t help as I don’t use Word – but don’t forget to make a couple of back-ups before you start tinkering!! 🙂

(*and not just cloud back-ups as todays IT goings on have proven!)

Make backups. At least 1 on site and 1 off site. Not all plugged in at the same time.

Do you have lots of images in your word doc? Word doesn’t handle them well if they’re large files.

Try ‘save as’ and rename the file. That use to work for me.

Or, open it in Pages which should be included on your Mac. Can export as word, PDF etc from there. It handles larger files and images better too.

Buy a Windows PC. They just work.

Thanks all. Decided to split it down into separate chapters to edit then hopefully piece it all together again at the end! Cheers

Buy a Windows PC. They just work.

Except when all of them in the world break

From memory (see what I did there), MS office suite on the Mac has a memory leak issue. Over the course of a couple of hours all the RAM get allocated and then swaps start happening and everything runs like a cow going backwards through treacle.

Regular restarts of the app and the machine if you must use word should help. (I would use Pages and End-Note on a 30 day free trial).

Cow backwards through treacle…..sums it up pretty damn well!

Thanks

I don’t do Macs, but –

Could be versions.  Save with a fresh filename and clear old versions.

Could be graphic files. Docx (on Windows) is a zip file. Make a copy, change from docx to zip and go have a look.

I don’t use Mendelev, but –

Turn off reference autoupdate. Just do it while making a cuppa (certainly works on EndNote).

Good luck !

and not just cloud back-ups as todays IT goings on have proven!

I would hope Apple’s iCloud isn’t on Windows.

Buy a Windows PC. They just work.
Except when all of them in the world break

To be fair to MS home PCs are apparently OK. They don’t use Crowdstrike.

If you’re using the Office 365 version of Word then try cleaning the version history. What can be a 10 mb on face could be 2 Gb of version history in the background. I’ve not had any recent issues with Mendeley. But if you have lots of tracked changes that can be be a major slow down.

have lots of tracked changes that can be be a major slow down

Oh yes – always accept all track-changes.

I prefer to compare back to a previous draft. Lot easier to work on and the compared document is a lot cleaner.

Thanks for the advice guys. Will try and clean the version history i think