Autosave on every copy

[Justin Gregory]

In Mac Word 2008, every time I copy (Command-C) a bit of text or
anything else, Word auto-saves the document. This often causes an
annoying delay, as the app is not responsive during the second or so
that it is saving. Usually I just want to do a very quick copy-paste
to move a block of text. Is there a reason for this behavior? Can I
turn it off?

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Justin:

I have never heard of those precise symptoms. What I think may be happening
is this:

A) You have set your Autorecover period "short"

B) Word will not trigger an AutoRecover save if the document has not
"changed"

C) As soon as you COPY text, Word inserts a pair of markers in the text to
mark the selection. It cleans them up after you paste. But that means the
document "has" changed, and the AutoRecover save will then fire.

Examine your setting in Word>Preferences>General>"Save Autorecover every..."

Ten minutes is the default. When editing, I often set it to 30 to avoid
exactly the problem you mention.

The other thing that can affect this is if your computer is a little light
on free memory. Word attempts to populate a buffer in memory with the bits
of the document you are working on. If memory is low, Word may need to page
out the content of the buffer to spool in more text. That would also
trigger a save.

I'm guessing a bit ‹ hope it helps!

Cheers

In Mac Word 2008, every time I copy (Command-C) a bit of text or
anything else, Word auto-saves the document. This often causes an
annoying delay, as the app is not responsive during the second or so
that it is saving. Usually I just want to do a very quick copy-paste
to move a block of text. Is there a reason for this behavior? Can I
turn it off?

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[Justin Gregory]

Examine your setting in Word>Preferences>General>"Save Autorecover every...."

The other thing that can affect this is if your computer is a little light
on free memory.  Word attempts to populate a buffer in memory with the bits
of the document you are working on.  If memory is low, Word may need topage
out the content of the buffer to spool in more text.  That would also
trigger a save.

Hi, John. My Autosave is set to the default, but I will try upping it
a bit to see if that helps.

I think you are correct about the memory issue. I checked activity
monitor, and noticed that I had very little free memory left. After
quitting some programs, the behavior seemed to go away. This was by
no means a large file I was working on, though. Perhaps Word could be
made to keep the whole file in memory if its size is below some
threshold? I dunno. Thanks for your help, this seems to have fixed
it. (I have been considering a memory upgrade anyways).

-- Justin

 

[CyberTaz]

Hi Justin -

You still haven't mentioned what amount of RAM you do have or what version
of OS X, but if it's Leopard (10.5.x) anything less than 1.25 GB is
"minimally adequate" when running major applications. It really does help to
have 2 GB or more. Memory management on the Mac is handled by the OS and
unlike in versions through OS 9 you can't assign RAM amounts for your apps.

The size of the document really doesn't have much to do with it in most
cases - unless you're dealing with really *huge* complex files, graphics, or
other types of media. Besides, Word has nothing to do with the memory
required for cut/copy operations - that's a service of the OS as well.

I am curious, though, as to why you are of the impression that Word
"auto-saves" when you copy. If it's just a matter of disk activity I'm
guessing it's actually because the OS is caching info to disk (virtual
memory) due to limited RAM when you copy. If that's the case, available disk
space could be [or become] a factor as well.

Regards |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Justin:

That's exactly how it *is* coded However, I am not sure how big the
buffer *is* these days.

It used to be settable, back in the days when 64 Kb was a lot of memory, and
the buffer was either 64 kb or double that... Greedy persons such as me
used to up it to 256 and crash Windows 3.1...

These days, I believe the buffer is dynamic, but it is probably a percentage
of the available free memory. How many "pages" that holds depends upon how
many graphics you have in the document and how many fonts you have in use...

It can be really, REALLY helpful to re-start your Mac when you finish work
for the day if physical memory is low. That not only cleans up the memory
fragments, it also triggers some OS X system housekeeping that clears out
the temp files and all the zillions of file handles that remain loaded "just
in case".

If you do this at the end of the day, you do not lose any working time, and
you come in to a clean fast machine tomorrow...

Cheers

Hi, John. My Autosave is set to the default, but I will try upping it
a bit to see if that helps.

I think you are correct about the memory issue. I checked activity
monitor, and noticed that I had very little free memory left. After
quitting some programs, the behavior seemed to go away. This was by
no means a large file I was working on, though. Perhaps Word could be
made to keep the whole file in memory if its size is below some
threshold? I dunno. Thanks for your help, this seems to have fixed
it. (I have been considering a memory upgrade anyways).

-- Justin

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[Justin Gregory]

It can be really, REALLY helpful to re-start your Mac when you finish work
for the day if physical memory is low.  That not only cleans up the memory
fragments, it also triggers some OS X system housekeeping that clears out
the temp files and all the zillions of file handles that remain loaded "just
in case".

Yes, I think I'll start doing that. It's a MacBook, so sometimes it
goes several days without a restart.

I am curious, though, as to why you are of the impression that Word
"auto-saves" when you copy. If it's just a matter of disk activity I'm
guessing it's actually because the OS is caching info to disk (virtual
memory) due to limited RAM when you copy. If that's the case, available disk
space could be [or become] a factor as well.

I get that impression because the status bar at the bottom of the
window says "Saving..." and there is a progress bar next to it that
goes from zero to full during the delay.

You still haven't mentioned what amount of RAM you do have or what version
of OS X, but if it's Leopard (10.5.x) anything less than 1.25 GB is
"minimally adequate" when running major applications.

Yes, it's Leopard and I have 1 GB of ram. I will see about an
upgrade, but really, operating systems and applications seem to be
getting out of control with RAM requirements these days.

Thanks to all for your help!

 

[CyberTaz]

Hello Justin -

<snip>

but really, operating systems and applications seem to be
getting out of control with RAM requirements these days.

<snip>

[Un]fortunately that's the nature of the beast... Technology expands the
horizon then software races to fill the newly available void I hesitate
to confess that I can remember a time when 1 MB of RAM was a "breakthrough".

Regards |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[dgotchac]

Hello,

Have you solved the problem because i've got exactly the same.

MBA 1st Gen with 2 Go RAM, all other apps closed
Autosave set to 10 mn, 60 mn or void => The same

Thanks for your help...

David

 

[John McGhie]

Reboot it and see if that clears it.

What's "MBA" (apart from "Management by Wandering Aimlessly")??

Cheers

Hello,

Have you solved the problem because i've got exactly the same.

MBA 1st Gen with 2 Go RAM, all other apps closed
Autosave set to 10 mn, 60 mn or void => The same

Thanks for your help...

David

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[dgotchac]

No changes. Any other idea ?

If not, word crashes quite often. Is it possible just to reinstall Word and not all the Office stuff ?

Thanks for your help...

 

[John McGhie]

The problem is folder permissions in the user ID you are using.

It actually has nothing to do with "Word", and re-installing will not touch,
alter, or even look at, any of the files involved.

Sorry: "Re-installing" is a PC technique. It usually has no effect on the
Mac. When it does change something (maybe one time out of a thousand...) it
will insert mis-matched software components and make things much worse!

"Command + c" (Copy) copies the selected text and all of its properties. To
ensure that those properties are up to date, Word needs to refresh some of
them. When you copy, you should notice a quick check of the Printer, and
the attached Template, and the System clock, and the Language environment,
to refresh the document properties.

I would prefer a different design, but that's the one they use...

Cheers

No changes. Any other idea ?

If not, word crashes quite often. Is it possible just to reinstall Word and
not all the Office stuff ?

Thanks for your help...

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[dgotchac]

I did a chown -RL 501:20 * and the a chmod -RL 777 * from my home directory so now all files and sym. links are mine and with complete rights.

My user is 501 (mac default) and my group is 20 (staff)

Same damned problem. What rights can I give, i haven't already gave ???

 

[John McGhie]

I don't know, so let me take a wild guess: When the permissions were wrong,
Word wrote inconsistent junk into some or all of its preference files. Now
that the permissions are OK, let's re-generate the permissions files and see
if that fixes the issue:

1) Find and drag the file Normal.dotm to your desktop. Unless you have
moved it, it should be in
/Users/ ~ /Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/User Templates/

2) If the following files exist, Remove or rename them:

~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Word Settings (10)

~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Word Settings (11)

User/Library/Preferences/com.Microsoft.Word.plist

User/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office 2008 (the whole folder!)

3) Then Repair Permissions with Disk Utility.

Something will change, and if we get really lucky, we might even get an
error message to tell us what is wrong.

Hope this helps

I did a chown -RL 501:20 * and the a chmod -RL 777 * from my home directory so
now all files and sym. links are mine and with complete rights.

My user is 501 (mac default) and my group is 20 (staff)

Same damned problem. What rights can I give, i haven't already gave ???

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[dgotchac]

Thank You John.

Do you bealeive I did exactly step by step what you suggested and the problem is still there ...

This is crazy !

 

[John McGhie]

Oh, Yes, I DO believe it.

But I've run out of ideas as to the cause.

It's "something" in that User ID.

If you would prefer not to waste any more time on this, simply move all your
documents into the new user ID and delete the old one.

Something is pooched in there, but I have no idea what.

Sorry

Thank You John.

Do you bealeive I did exactly step by step what you suggested and the problem
is still there ...

This is crazy !

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]