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It is impossible to edit some documents because of VERY slow, jerky, jumpy, laggy, erratic, stuttering cursor movement (horizontal worse than vertical). I have been forced to go back to using Word 2011. I am a professional novelist and cannot practice my trade with Word 2016!! This is very disappointing.
As a novelist I work with large word count simply formatted documents with a file size of less than 1M. I have not experimented to find a cut off point with regard to word count but documents in the 100K word size or more (less than 1M file size) exhibit this slow, jerky, laggy cursor movement problem. Small documents in the 5K word range do not have this problem on any of my notebooks.
It can take 10 seconds or more to move the cursor from the right to left side of the page (or vice-versa). This slow erratic cursor movement is especially troubling when trying to select a few words (highlighting them) for editing. It is very frustrating.
I have experimented and found that brand new documents in 2016 file format exhibit this problem. I have created documents with zero text formatting and they have this problem. I removed all formatting in these test documents by copying and pasting ASCII text into the newly created 2016 format doc from original Word 2011 documents.
I have replicated this same problem on three different macbook computers all with SSD and max ram. None of these computers are running with more than 5% CPU utilization (running nothing else except Word 2016). All of these notebook computers edit the same files just fine using Word 2011.
Track changes is not turned on, nor is any other unusual "feature" or function. This problem occurs in all display modes: draft, layout, etc.
**All these notebooks are running the latest version of Yosemite and all with 100% up to date software.
**This is a fatal mission-critical problem for me which has forced me to revert back to using Word 2011. Again, this is very disappointing.**I have been a Word user for something over 25 years (started on MS/PC DOS).
Similar / same problems here:
A family of Microsoft word processing software products for creating web, email, and print documents.
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I confirm quitting Dropbox solves that ridiculous M$oft lag for me.
But Bill Gates just put 1 billion in SoftBank so all bugs will be gone.
I'm not a Mac user. But I had this issue in my PC with Word 2016, and after a long search and trying several suggestions that didn't work, I found a solution, that maybe could work for you too, in the following link (it's in Portuguese):
The only thing I had to do was rename two registry folders:
Note that this post was from 2012, so you must look for and rename the latest folder, which in my case was: Locate the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office*16.0*\Word
I renamed these two folders as instructed and the cursor returned to it lightning fast speed.
I know that these are instructions for PC, but if you could find the parallel folders in Mac, maybe it could help.
The equivalent dialog in Word for Mac is Tools > Templates and Add-ins. Turn off any add-ins that are active and then compare performance.
This thread is mixed. Some comments refer to Word 2016 on Windows, some to Word 2016 on macOS.
The "Enable Live Preview" option is on Windows.
Are you sure you're using a Mac?
You refer to File > Options > General and, "Enable Live Preview?
This is what general control panel looks like on a Mac.
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