Word 2003 redraws tables slowly and gets stuck.

I continue to use Word 2003. (I tried 2007 with the ribbon for a few months, couldn't find anything.)

W10 redraws a Word table very slowly, just a few rows per second, always redraws the table once more than I think is necessary. Slow is not so terrible, but that knocks on to the next problem. If the table is big, e.g. 30 rows and more than half as wide as the screen, before the redraw gets to the end of the table the next redraw starts. Now Word is stuck, continuously redrawing the table from the start, but never completing.

I can't fix that situation except by stopping Winword with Task-Manager. Occasionally if the table is not too big, I can put e.g. explorer full screen, and in the background Word can catch up and everything is alright.

If I know a document has a big table I can avoid the problem by making Word's window small so it doesn't have to draw much of the table.

This problem has always been there with W10 (currently 22H2), can't remember if it was there in W7. Was not there in XP.

The best solution would be to fix the slow update. If that's not possible maybe the document or table update could be less often or manual and that would avoid the problem.

Any help appreciated.

Do you have access to a later version of Word to try the document on? It may be that the document itself is corrupted. If it's not sensitive, let us have a look?

Thank you for your various replies. It's not just one document, a table in a new document will have the problem as soon as it reaches c. 30 rows * half screen wide. This has been a feature since the first W10 (might have been W7) through 2 different laptops and a few complete C: disk reloads.

Seems you're not the only one: Speed Up Word's Handling of Tables : MS Word

There are some tips on speeding things up there.

If office 2007 and later don’t have the same problem with tables, maybe you would consider using a later version of office instead
There are some solutions that allow you to use office 2007 and later with the menu look from 2003
ubitmenu is the one I’ve used (tried it on office 2019 and it worked)
It installs an extra menu in word (Excel and PowerPoint too) with the look from office 2003
This means that you can use the 2003 menu and ribbon menu at the same time

@Try3 These are documents of notes, with occasional tables. I could put a link to an excel workbook (2 files instead of 1), or maybe embed a worksheet. I've just tried an embedded worksheet. It has lots of extra features that I don't want, and missing some simple features e.g. auto-resize, that I want.

@mgerhold I looked through that page, where relevant I'm doing that already. Mostly they are talking about more complicated table options that I don't use. When this fault first arrived I was quite surprised, because it makes me think that the way Word displays a table goes quite deep into graphics software, very O.S. dependent.

@tennek. Some while back I tried some add-on solutions, each one worked sort-of, but not perfectly and so makes other complications that have to be lived with. Next time I have a PC/VM with O365 I'll try ubitmenu.

Thanks for the suggestions.