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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.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
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.
My cursor issue is along the same lines as described in the thread... when I pop into a cell that has txt (Excel 2016) and edit the txt, say delete several characters, it starts the delete in a different space than where my cursor is. Really confusing as it seems to be off by a factor of 2 to 3 characters and sometimes actually is in the middle of a character. This makes Excel completely useless.
I am running on a iMac 27 Retina and on a new MacBook 12-inch Retina. Same for both. Sent the excel spreadsheet to a friend who has a MacBook Pro 15-inch Retina and he can not reproduce the same issue.
Any help would be appreciated. I do like the new look and feel of the product, but as said with this issue, it's completely useless to me in it's present form.
Cheers,
Stu
Hi Caroline:
Not such a crazy idea, methinks. None of the beta testers ever experienced this issue: it first showed up ONLY in the released version. For most folks, it seems to have been cured with the 15.12.3 update, which adjusted the tuning of various modules.
Currently, there is no 64-bit version of Office for Mac. I understand that parts of it can elevate themselves to 64-bit if needed, but i believe this applies only to Excel. So to answer your question: It's a 32-bit app and that's the only flavour there is.
According to water-cooler gossip that I hear, this issue is dependant upon the Proofing Tools (Spelling and Grammar) being set to their "Default" settings. Prior to build 15.12.3, the Spelling Checker and Grammar Checker engine was able to help itself to too many time-slices of the CPU. Since Office is a single-threaded application, this lead to the jerkiness. Update 15.12.3 throttled back the scheduling of the proofing engine and cured the issue for many people.
I never saw the issue, because one of the first settings I make is to switch everything to Australian English. You might like to try that as a test (you will need to reboot). Of course, you won't recognise the result as "English", but you may lose the problem :-)
I don't think the presence or absence of Outlook is material. However, the presence of multiple cloud connections may be. I have OneDrive and DropBox running here (without problems, but I never use either from within Office). BoxCryptor may be an issue: try disabling that as an experiment. And some folks get a conflict with Sophos AntiVirus (but that tends to produce a very slow startup).
What I would like you to do is run Activity Monitor, and look to see if anything else is gobbling CPU when Word gets jerky (and if so, what...). Incidentally, Activity Monitor will show you the bitness of each running application if you go to the View menu and add the Kind column to its display.
Oh! I can see your problem! Your machine is too new. Send it to me, and you have this one! There, that will fix it :-) (I admire a person who's hardware strategy is "fill 'er up!").
Meantime, I will ping the long-suffering Derik and let him know it's not fixed yet.
Sorry to be no help at all.
Hi Derik,
I am having the exact same issue running 15.12.13, is there a fix for this problem yet? My Mac Book Pro (2011) is an old 15" but it has been freshly installed (via format) with a brand new Mac OS X and I never bothered to install Office 2011 as I thought I would signup and get the latest.
Can you please update this forum with your progress, wondering if I should try install the old version already?
Strange, the "low resolution" checkbox does not appear at all on my system. There is only the "Locked" checkbox there, no second checkbox.
What mac model are you using, and which OS version? My guess would be that the checkbox is only present on models with high-resolution Retina displays, and the checkbox tells the OS to open the app in regular, pre-Retina resolution.
In that case, it should not have anything to do with 32 vs. 64 bit, though it could still affect CPU usage.