Publisher extremely slow on M1 Macbook Pro

[Scott Benedict]

I'm new to Publisher and today have been having the spinning wheel of death all day. I can't even select text without the ball coming on and I wait and wait. I'm running version 1.9.1 and my file is under 500KB. I have the newest MacBook Pro M1 with 8GB of RAM and 8 cores. This should not be running this slowly. Any ideas?

[Scott Benedict]

I think this is related to my filler text not being able to be deleted at the end of my section. It seems whenever I'm on the second page of a spread, that's when publisher slows way down until I link it to the next page. That filler text from each of the 10 pages previous are not being deleted, but just being added to the end, causing memory issues I suspect.

[Old Bruce]

Filler text is by default set to expand. You can (with the text selected) go to Text > Expand > Expand Field and this will turn the text into a finite amount filling the text frames and not expanding automatically into new ones.

To make the Filler text behave like normal text (has a start and end) go to Preferences > General and click the checkbox for Insert Filler Text as Text.

[Scott Benedict]

Thank you! This helps, but right now, I have one of my pages that has pages and pages and pages of autofill text that was never replaced by real text (just pushed down). It's causing an overflow error and I've already spent 90 minutes trying to delete it (select, expand, delete) and it's still not done. Is there a way I can select just this text without selecint all of my text that I want in the previous 10 pages? I don't know how much longer I will need to manually delete this text. It seems that this is not how filler text was supposed to work. It should be replaced once you put in your own text.

[Scott Benedict]

It took a long time, but finally got all of the overflow autofill gone! UGH! What a pain.

[MikeTO]

On 3/11/2021 at 7:22 PM, Scott Benedict said:

Thank you! This helps, but right now, I have one of my pages that has pages and pages and pages of autofill text that was never replaced by real text (just pushed down). It's causing an overflow error and I've already spent 90 minutes trying to delete it (select, expand, delete) and it's still not done. Is there a way I can select just this text without selecint all of my text that I want in the previous 10 pages? I don't know how much longer I will need to manually delete this text. It seems that this is not how filler text was supposed to work. It should be replaced once you put in your own text.

I know it's too late now - I'm seeing this late - but to delete overflowed text that you can't see such as your pages and pages of filler text that was pushed down, just position the insertion point cursor near the end of the visible text and shift select to the end of the story - I believe it's Shift+Command+Down Arrow. Then hit Delete.