Track Changes and comments can cause Microsoft Word to become slow or sticky – according to one of my tests, the difference can be as much as 97%. For copyeditors, proofreaders and writers, this slowness can crush efficiency. Key tactics to speed up Microsoft Word when you’re working with Track Changes and comments include avoiding or removing unnecessary tracking and comments, selectively tracking different reviewers’ changes, and considering workarounds like printing the tracking and comments to PDF.
You’re at the start of an edit and you’re in the zone. The document is working smoothly, and the edits are flowing from your brain right onto the page. You’re quickly adding and resolving comments as needed, and your screen is practically glittering from all the appropriate, insightful and diligent edits you’re making.
But over time, things start to feel out of sync. You see a great edit to be made, and then a solid improvement in the line below. But by the time Word’s caught up with the first edit, your eyes have skipped ahead and noticed two more changes. And you’re trying to keep all of them in your head, with the lagginess compounding and compounding.
And then there are the comments. Oh, the comments.
You try to click in a comment but Word isn’t having it. For some reason it thinks you want a different comment (inexplicably, this might be 20 pages away). You have to click six times to make Word register that you want to add a reply to an existing comment. And then the Delete and Resolve buttons stop working.
At this point you start longing for the old days when software actually worked. Maybe a stone slate and some chalk would be better.
Why it matters that Track Changes can make Microsoft Word slow or sticky
When Microsoft Word gets slow or laggy, it can crush your productivity as a copyeditor, proofreader or writer. I’ve been there, and trust me I know your pain (on a few rage-inducing occasions, my neighbours – and perhaps amoebas living on Mars – might even have heard in detail just how much pain I was feeling).
But there are ways to speed Word up while continuing to use Track Changes. I often need to think creatively about using tracked changes when I’m editing in Word. And I’ve helped out clients who were struggling with tracked files that were slow, glitchy or unreliable.
Let’s look at a case study from one of my recent projects to show just how much Track Changes can make Word slow down – according to one metric, by as much as 97%. After that I’ll suggest some ways you can speed up Microsoft Word when you’re working with Track Changes.
Track Changes can slow down Microsoft Word
I’ve recently come to the end of a 220,000-word edit. That’s six months’ worth of edits, all tracked.
For me as a professional copyeditor, tracking all the changes was absolutely necessary. The authors needed to be able to see and approve each change. It was also a complex project where I needed to go back over the text multiple times, so I had to be able to see my past changes (and the ones from the author) all the time. It wouldn’t have worked to run Compare Documents when I wanted to see my changes. I needed them to all be right there, accessible and clear, so there was no risk of me accidentally making new changes that messed up or conflicted with old ones.
But over the six months, the document got slower and slower. I have a fairly high-spec PC to allow me to work on large documents, including a 1TB M.2 hard drive and 16 GB of RAM.
And yet the document gradually got stickier and stickier, with my PC getting tetchier and tetchier, greeting me like a disgruntled bee with an angry hum the moment I opened the document.
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The startling effect of Track Changes on document speed
On smaller documents, we might have an instinct that Word is running slow with lots of tracked changes. But the slowness can be hard to quantify. In contrast, on a large document like mine, because everything is on a bigger scale, it’s easier to see just how much Word slows down when a document contains lots of tracking.
So I decided to use this unusually large example to get some data on just what Track Changes does to the speed of a Microsoft Word document.
To do this, I put Word on a Track Changes ‘diet’ to see the effects of removing six months’ worth of tracking. In the tradition of before-and-after transformations, we’ll compare the file before and after accepting the tracking and deleting the comments.
Starting statistics: before accepting Track Changes and deleting comments
| Revisions (Track Changes markings) | 28,758 |
| Comments | 881 |
| File size | 1,702 KB |
| Pages | 1,110 |
| Time taken to count pages after opening file | 11 minutes 37 seconds (and I was treated to a completely black screen for a portion of this time) |
| CPU usage while typing | Around 25% |
The revisions count is obviously very high (remember: six months of editing!). And yet I’d been accepting formatting tracking at intervals throughout the edit, so only the essential textual tracking remained. If I hadn’t accepted the formatting tracking, there would have been thousands more revisions and the document would have been even slower (in fact, from experience, I’d say there’d be a good chance it would essentially have been unusable).
The comments are the bubbles that appear in the margin. About 90% of these had been marked resolved at the point I recorded these stats. I don’t know whether Word handles resolved comments any better or worse than open ones in terms of document speed.
The file size and page count are self-explanatory.
Time taken to count pages after opening the file needs a bit more explanation. You know how Word shows ‘Page # of #’ in the bottom left of the window? You might have noticed that it sometimes takes a while for the count to appear. But I’m not sure I’ve ever before had Word take 11 minutes and 37 seconds to complete its count.
Anecdotally, from thousands upon thousands of editing hours, I’m convinced the time it takes for Microsoft Word to complete this count is one of the strongest indicators of whether a document is going to be slow, sticky or otherwise annoying to work with.
(Oh and incidentally, yes I did stand and wait with a stopwatch. I got hungry. And, unlike the file, I don't even need to diet.)
Finally, the CPU usage is the approximate amount of my computer’s processing power Word used when I typed (found in the Task Manager). I wasn’t sure if this would change much (spoiler: it didn’t) but I was geekily curious to see.
Ending statistics: after accepting Track Changes and deleting comments
When I accepted all the Track Changes and deleted the comments, I noticed a massive difference. The document was immediately far more responsive, smoother and less laggy. My disgruntled bee had become, well, not quite a sleek dragonfly, but at least an agile ladybird.
Here are the numbers:
| Before | After | Change | |
| Revisions (Track Changes markings) | 28,758 | 0 | – |
| Comments | 881 | 0 | – |
| File size | 1,702 KB | 1,090 KB | –36% |
| Pages | 1,110 | 1,060 | –5% |
| Time taken to count pages after opening file | 11 minutes 37 seconds (with black screen for a portion of this time) | 21 seconds (with no black screen) | –97% |
| CPU usage while typing | Around 25% | Around 24% | –4% |
The stand-out change is obviously the time taken to count the pages, which dropped by a staggering 97%. I couldn’t quite believe this at first and so repeated the experiment (what you see are the averages of my findings).
The file size also dropped by a hefty amount (36%).
The 4% drop in the number of pages might not seem like much until you realize that the drop represents 50 entire pages purely of tracked changes.
Finally, I was surprised, given how much faster the document seemed, that the CPU usage didn’t decline more. The reasons for this are beyond my ken, so I present the number simply for your edification (or not).
What can we learn about how to speed up Microsoft Word with Track Changes?
It’s clear from these results that Track Changes can have a massive effect on how quickly a Word file runs. My main takeaway from the process was this: if Word takes a long time to count the number of pages when you open a file, it’s a sign the file is likely to run slowly and therefore be difficult to handle.
Anecdotally I’ve seen how removing tracking and comments speeds up Word documents of all sizes. So I wouldn’t be surprised if proportionally similar improvements could be achieved on smaller documents too.
How can you speed up Word’s handling of Track Changes when you can’t accept them?
Sometimes you can find yourself stuck between a rock and a hard place: you need to keep a document’s tracked changes and comments to enable you to efficiently see previous edits. But those very tracked changes and comments can end up bloating the file to the extent they hamper your efficiency in other ways.
Here are some suggestions for how to speed up a Word document with lots of tracked changes and comments when you can’t simply accept/delete the lot and start afresh with a clean file.
Important: If you’re unfamiliar with any of these techniques, please test them on a backup first.
- Think ahead. If certain changes won’t ever need to be tracked, don’t let them into the file in the first place. For example, if spelling changes are non-negotiable and the author doesn’t need to approve them, make them with Track Changes turned off. (Just remember to turn tracking on again after!)
- Delete old or resolved comments. If there are comments that are no longer relevant, delete them. And do you really need the comments you’ve marked as resolved? If not, go to Review > Delete dropdown > Delete All Resolved Comments.
- Accept just the formatting tracking. It’s good practice to do this regularly anyway. On a PC, go to Review > Show Markup (PC) or Review > Mark-up Options (Mac) and untick Insertions and Deletions. Then go to Review > Accept dropdown > Accept All Changes Shown. Then go back to Review > Show Markup and retick Insertions and Deletions.
- Accept tracking by one or more reviewers. Maybe you can accept tracking by a past reviewer of the document whose changes are no longer relevant to your editing decisions? If so, go to Review > Show Markup (PC) or Review Mark-up Options (Mac), then go to Specific People and untick anybody whose changes you want to keep. Then go to Review > Accept dropdown > Accept All Changes Shown. Then go back to the Specific People list and tick All Reviewers to make the remaining tracking visible again.
- Accept tracking in chunks. If you’ve finished working on chunks of the document, accept the tracking and delete the comments in those chunks. Or, if you need to keep the tracking and comments, cut and paste the completed chunks into a separate document (just make sure Track Changes is turned off in both the original document and the destination document, so your tracking remains visible).
- Cheat. If it’s not essential to have the tracking immediately available in the Word document, consider creating a PDF that you can refer to (perhaps on a second screen) and then accepting the tracking in the Word document. It’s not guaranteed, but the PDF may perform faster than your Word document. To create a PDF of a Word document with the tracking and comments visible, go to Home > Export > Create PDF/XPS Document. You can then accept the tracking in your Word document. Just check this won’t cause problems for your client or anyone else who will be using the Word document. It’s important to understand that in the PDF, the tracking and comments will be static visual representations of the contents of the Word document at the time you created the PDF – they won’t be editable.
Spend more time editing
Accepting Track Changes and Comments – or at least minimizing them – can be an effective way of speeding up a Microsoft Word document. This can allow you to spend more time editing and less time fighting with your very own disgruntled bee. It can also help your client by making tracked files easier for them to use.
Handling Track Changes and comments appropriately is one of the topics in my course Perfect Handovers for Editorial Projects. Take a look for more insights you can use in your projects.
I’ve always had an ‘uh-oh!’ feeling when a large Word file takes a while to tell me how many pages there are, so it’s good to read an empirical confirmation of this!
I was similarly pleased to have my instincts confirmed, Jack! Even if sometimes there’s not a huge amount we can do about it, at least it’s good to be able to prepare and plan for a slow/sticky file.
I edit scientific papers and theses in an academic agricultural engineering context. MS-Word ‘Track changes’ drives me batty. The slowing down is particularly egregious when complex equations are edited or moved (solved to some extent by accepting the move/edit) — for clients that insist on full track changes I often split the document into 2 or 3 files. Occasionally saving the file under another name, then rebooting the PC helps for a little while, but the slowness returns! So don’t feel too bad, you aren’t the only one plagued by this. Personally, I’d still use WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS (first WYSIWYG version) if it was convenient and very easy to edit text and coding — but then I’ve been a text editor going back to the AES-90 (https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/aes-90) in the late 1970s. 🙂
I used WordPerfect in the 1990s, Georges! I don’t remember the version, but I do remember you could see formatting tags around the elements, just like in HTML and copyediting codes. I still miss those tags in Word.
The one thing I’ve been able to do in this regard without contravening management directives is turning off the automatic word count. Right click on the status bar and uncheck word count, according to Microsoft.
I seem to remember initially having to do something more complicated to stop the word count from coming back, but as I’m in the process of moving from Win 10 to Win 11, I haven’t been able to track that down. But I can say for sure that the word count bogs it down immensely.
Other than that, I’ve had to break up long documents into segments during the editing process and then put it all back together at the end to create the hyperlinked table of contents properly.
Thank you, Miranda. I hadn’t come across that suggestion before. Unfortunately I can’t spot any difference from turning off the word count in my current files. But the more options we have when faced with a slow document, the better!
Thank you, this is very affirming!
Hazel, I just came across this helpful and informative blog post. Thank you for your diagnostics. They confirmed my suspicions and gave me some incentive to minimize the pain. I didn’t know you could isolate the changes of one person and accept them like you can the formatting changes. I often ask clients to break their manuscripts into chapters, but many are loathe to do so.
I’m happy to have helped a little bit, Rebecca. Accepting one person’s tracking can make a huge difference on some projects and I hope it makes a difference for you.
I was tickled by your mention of separating out files – I’m always trying to persuade my clients to let me combine files into one! (Working with everything in one file suits my editing methodology, which is why I’m so determined to circumvent Word’s painful slowness.)
Thank you for reading.
I’m a scientific editor. What about this: Do it all without track changes turned on, then do a compare documents with the original. It shows everything you have changed as a tracked change. Another thing that helps me a lot is to split the screen (Window/Split) so you can go and look at another part of the document at the same time. This definitely won’t speed up the program but it’s faster than scrolling back and forth. And finally, using the “draft” rather than “print layout” is faster — I think.