How-To

How to Turn Off Background Repagination in Word

By Adam Davidson

Published April 7, 2023

Word will automatically adjust your pages as you work, but this can slow things down. Learn how to turn off background repagination in Word here.

There are a lot of features that run under the hood of your favorite apps. For example, when you’re working on a Word document, you don’t even stop to think about how the app is constantly changing the layout of your pages as you add new text to them. Text automatically shifts down or onto a new page without you even really noticing.

Sometimes, however, you might start to notice. That’s when the process of arranging your pages in Word starts to slow the whole app down. This is called background repagination and, in most cases, this isn’t something you’ll even notice. If you’re working with larger documents, however, you may find that things start to grind to a halt.

Thankfully, if this is happening to you, you can tweak one of the settings and this should fix the issue. Here’s how to turn off background repagination in Word.

What is Background Repagination in Word?

Pagination is the process of creating the page layout for your document. Microsoft Word needs to figure out which text goes on which page, and how many pages there are in the document. As you add more text to your document, Word needs to make changes to the page layout to make room for this additional text.

As more pages are created and text spills over from one page to the next, the pages must also be renumbered. This whole process is called repagination.

Background repagination is exactly what it sounds like; Word will work on repaginating your document in the background as you continue to work on it. You don’t need to do anything; the page layout and page numbering for your document will automatically change as you work on your document. This is the default setting in Word.

Why Would You Want to Turn Background Repagination Off?

If you only have a few pages in your document, you probably won’t ever notice repagination happening. However, for large documents, it can take some time for Word to repaginate everything. If you add extra text to page 23 of a 4,000-word document, the app will have to change the layout for pages 24 through 4,000. This can sometimes cause the app to start slowing up significantly.

Turning off background repagination can stop Word from continually repaginating as you add more text. Without having to constantly rearrange and renumber your pages, you should find that Word has fewer issues with slowing down.

How to Turn Off Background Repagination in Microsoft Word

It’s important to note that it’s only possible to turn off background repagination in Word when you’re in Draft view. Since the other views need to be able to show the current page layout for all pages, this option is grayed out in settings, and you can’t turn it off.

To turn off background repagination in Word:

1. Click the View menu.
   
2. Select Draft view.
   
3. Click the File menu.
   
4. At the very bottom of the left-hand menu, click Options.
   
5. Select Advanced from the left-hand menu.
   
6. Scroll down quite far to the General section.
   
7. Uncheck Enable Background Repagination.
   
8. If this option is grayed out, you weren’t in Draft view. Repeat the steps above, making sure you complete steps 1 and 2 first.
9. To turn background repagination back on again, repeat steps 1-6 and check Enable Background Repagination.

Managing Settings in Microsoft Word

Learning how to turn off background repagination in Word allows you to take matters into your own hands if the constant repagination of large documents is slowing things down for you. There are plenty of other useful Word tips and tricks that it’s worth knowing.

If you’re searching through a long document, you can use wildcards to search in Word. This allows you to have much more control over what Word looks for. If you’re working on a document that features numbers, you may want to know how to type fractions in Word.

And if you’re working in landscape mode to make full use of your computer screen real estate, you might want to know how to split a Word document in half.