MS Word running EXTREMELY slow on Sierra

[mamlukman]

Sorry to be back here again so soon after my 5-day battle to install Sierra. Now that I've got Sierra actually running, I may be regretting my decision.

MS Word (2011 version, 14.6.1) is running unbelievably slowly. Both the system and the applications are on the same SSD drive, and under El Capitan Word opened with no problem and opened files immediately. Now it is taking 2 minutes to open a 3 mb file (with photos). And if you want to scroll to another page once it opens, it takes about 5 minutes. I've timed it. It used to be almost instantaneous.

So something is seriously wrong. As always, I've looked at a bunch of forums, and there are a bunch of people--as always--with similar, but NOT identical problems. And the "answers" I have seen haven't solved anyone's problem (hundreds of people have similar problems).

The computer is a mid-2012 desktop Mac Pro 3.2 Ghz quad core with 8 Gb of RAM. Activity Monitor doesn't show anything different than it did under El Capitan--it's solidly in the green; 8 Gb physical memory, 6.72 Gb memory used, 1.27 Gb cached files, 62 Mb swap. Word is using 1.21 Gb of memory, 1.15 Gb compressed memory.

I've run disk utility first aid twice; no problems. I've gone into font book and deleted all duplicate fonts (there were a handful) and run "restore standard fonts." No change. I've taken a look at Word preference, but nothing jumps out at me. I've re-started three times....no change. I've looked at system preferences, but as far as I can see, they're exactly the same as they were under El Capitan, and I can't see anything that would cause a slowdown. I'm out of ideas. Anyone out there have some?

 

[BrianBaughn]

Try creating a new User Account and testing in that...to rule out or pinpoint your own User Account as the culprit.

 

[mamlukman]

I've answered my own question. As I said, I upgraded to Sierra a week or so ago, and I thought that this would be a good time to backup all my drives. I have a G4 with 4 external drives in the basement connected to my main computer upstairs with Ethernet cable. So after I upgraded to Sierra, I began to back them all up using Carbon Copy Cloner. Each drive is almost 2 Tb, so it takes about two days to back each one up, and so Carbon Copy Cloner has been running almost continuously.

So after I woke up this morning, I had a thought: Could it be that Carbon Copy Cloner was soaking up so much bandwidth (not memory--I had checked that) that it was somehow blocking MS Word files from operating properly?

And the answer was "Yes indeed." I stopped Carbon Copy Cloner and opened a MS Word file--the same one that had taken 2 minutes to open and about 5 minutes to scroll to a new page yesterday. Magic! It now opened in about 3 seconds (the normal length of time) and scrolled to a new page almost instantaneously. In other words it worked the same as it did under El Capitan.

Amazing.