I write long structured documents using Word for Mac. One of my big gripes has been how Word seems to repaginate every time you look at it funny, and how long it takes to do that repagination on long documents. I am a heavy user of styleref fields to automatically generate text for me.

On a hunch, I removed the styleref entry I was using in the footer, and simply typed the text in directly. My 370 page document now repaginates in less than two seconds, compared to the thirty seconds it was taking before. So, on the odd chance that anyone else might be suffering the same issue, I thought I'd pass on what worked for me.