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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.
Turning off Smart Cursor worked for me...
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I've gone back to Office for Mac 2011 and will keep an eye out for future updates.
When attempting to select a portion of text spanning more than a few paragraphs to copy in another document Word 2016 crashed continually when running my laptop (Retina MacBook Pro 13" 2015) under battery power. The crash logs pointed to a graphics issue. I could reproduce the error any number of times. With Word for Mac 2011 I never ran into this problem.
Since the Office 2016 suite offers no new killer features compared with the previous version I see no reason to upgrade, except perhaps with Outlook, which I've upgraded to since I prefer its user interface and ability to propose new times in Calendar.
The word-counting is not what is taking the time or causing the stutters: the word-counting is simply a sign that the process causing the bother is still running.
When you open or edit a document, Word must repaginate it, so it knows where to display everything.
Essentially, this means starting with the first character in the document and carefully fitting the next one to it, then the next, then the next...
It can't show you the word-count until it has completed this process.
There are complex (very complex) techniques to try to speed things up, but essentially, every time you type a character it has to start at the top and re-compute the entire document.
This gives us two problems: slow responses and jerky cursors. In an attempt to speed things up, they fed more CPU to the pagination engine, which produced serious jerky cursor problems. They throttled back the CPU allocation to pagination, and now we have slow responses.
There are major efforts under way to cure these issues.
All I can say is keep applying the updates that are automatically supplied to you. Every one will make the problem a little bit less. And hammer the smiley face: the more complaints they get there, the more people they will put on this bug. Complaining in here does no good: they're not reading here.
Hope this helps