Word 2016 Cursor movement slow, jumpy, laggy, erratic, stuttering in some documents

Anonymous
2015-07-13T06:29:26+00:00

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.

  • Brand new 2015 macbook 12" retina
  • 2013 Macbook Pro 13" retina
  • 2013 Macbook Air

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:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac/forum/macoffice2016-macword/office-2016-mac-very-laggy/e2656073-6f1b-4535-b78e-ee79e0a4fb4c

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac/forum/macoffice2016-macword/word-2016-laggy-ui-and-scrolling-issues/9de4aeb7-9058-4fb0-a331-72076fed72b2

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac/forum/macoffice2016-macword/performance-of-scrolling-in-word-2016-for-mac-is/f04bbc86-5753-4ef5-a2c3-5cfdcb8cb837

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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Anonymous
2016-12-14T20:46:25+00:00

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.

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  1. Anonymous
    2016-01-14T13:53:14+00:00

    I've a i7 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM. My machine is one of the best and still Microsoft software doesn't work like it should.

    At this point it is obvious that the problem is not the spelling enabled, slow computers, high resolution screens etc, the problem is: Microsoft does a really bad job in Office for Mac.

    Office programs are laggy, they crash, and when they don't you get the feel that they will due to the constant delays on the UI. Also, some animations are completely useless and poorly programmed, for instance on Excel when you select another cell.

    It's time for Microsoft to rethink what they're doing with office, this is ****. No software. And I really hope someone reads this comment, and decides to open Word side by side with Apple's Pages and write the same document on the two programs to see the difference.

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  2. Anonymous
    2016-01-14T10:18:23+00:00

    In my case turning off checking the spelling and grammar 'as you type' in Preferences->Spelling helped with all the lag I had experienced before (it got quite terrible in larger documents in which I scrolled around much).

    This resolved quite some of the "delayed typing" I had in Word 365 on a MacBook Pro 2015. Not 100% snappy like older Word iterations, but very much more doable.

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  3. Anonymous
    2016-01-11T12:28:30+00:00

    In my case turning off checking the spelling and grammar 'as you type' in Preferences->Spelling helped with all the lag I had experienced before (it got quite terrible in larger documents in which I scrolled around much).

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  4. Anonymous
    2016-01-10T11:26:10+00:00

    Hi,

    I have a relatively similar problem, in that word is just always laggy. However, I believe I have found a fix. It is as follows:

    1. Open Word (any document)
    2. Navigate to File>Options>Advanced
    3. Scroll down to the 'Display' section
    4. Make sure 'Disable Hardware Accelleration' is checked (ticked). If it already is, uncheck it. Now restart word and try to edit a document, it should work!

    I have absolutely no idea why this works for me (and hopefully everyone else), but I think it is an issue with Word communicating to graphics cards. If anyone could let me know why it works, that would be great!

    Don't forget to mark this is as helpful or as an answer if it was!

    I hope this helps!

    Thanks,

    Reece Coombes

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