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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.
John McGhie,
I did see improvements after the last update release. I had even thought the problem was completely solved after I started editing a new file. I switched on all G&S checkers, still had a good performance. Then once I opened a larger file that has more than 40 pages, like you did with your 500-page book, everything crashed immediately. Then I turned G&S checkers off, everything was back to "normal" again.
I agree that there might be other things involved with the poor performance of Word 2016, but it's very clear the G&S checkers are the main culprit. And it has to do with the document length or number of words as well.
"That was adjusted in one of the first updates released for Word 2016, and that fixed the issue for most folks."
Is that also true for Windows?
I am not quite sure what you are referring to: but it sounds a bit scary to me. Exactly which of the XML files did you remove?
The "XML file" in a Word document is the "Contents".
All of the text in the document is in a file named "document.xml". If you remove that, you certainly won't have performance problems: you will have an entirely blank document!
Hope this helps
I had the same problem with office 2016 for Mac. I had to log-in into office for Windows, where I knew that the "Inspection" works. I "inspected" the document and removed the xml file. It now works smoothly.
I hope it helps for you as well.