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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.
Hi Jim,
I'm glad to hear they're actively looking into it. I've installed it both here at home and at work, both Macs, and both running slow. Turning off the AutoCorrect helped in both cases. However, today, my home version slowed down again. I saw the suggestion to exit out of Dropbox, and that sped things up again.
Of course, as others have said, Dropbox integration is still necessary, since other customers use it and since we use it at work.
I unfortunately don't have time to help with its development, but I saw earlier that you'd requested more people post if they have something useful to post, so here it is.
Stats:
iMac mid-2011
2.5 GHz Intel Core i5
12 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
Running El Capitan
I also seem to have a remnant of Word 2008 on my system. I had it installed at one point, of course, until I upgraded to Office 365. I uninstalled Word 2008 and haven't seen it since. However, after I installed Office 2016 for Mac, AutoUpdater now repeatedly asks to download a 2008 update. You (or someone else) had mentioned earlier that this slow-down problem isn't on all machines. Not sure if something from Word/Office 2008 is contributing? (The machine at work never had Office 2008, but I don't know if it's slowed down again since I was last in on Thursday. As of Thursday, it was working fine so long as AutoCorrect was turned off. I also don't have its stats handy, but it's not quite three years old, runs on El Capitan, and has 8 GB RAM.)
DropBox integration is something Microsoft is actively working on. If you want to help with its development, join the Insider Fast program (beta program - unsupported builds with large and frequent updates) and post results to the special insider forum.
To join, go to the Help menu in Word and choose Check for Updates to open AutoUpdate app. Click the box to join the Insider program and then click the pop-up to choose the Fast version.
Even if you don't want to join the program, be sure to post the version and build number in replies to this thread because the behavior is sure to change over time. To get the version and build number use the Word menu and choose About Word. Saying "latest" version is not helpful, as the latest version changes every few weeks.
I am still having the same problem: very high CPU usage (around 100%) and very large lags when typing. It is excruciating.
Hi Matt, Have you tried to start computer with shift-key down?
This will make a start/boot with all extensions off, there might be a conflict somewhere..
Hi Michael,
A good idea! It was noticeably faster with the safe-mode startup. There were only three items in my startup list: iTunesHelper, Dropbox and BitTorrent. I removed all three, and then rebooted the computer. BitTorrent started up again anyway (presumably because it was running before I logged out), but Word then ran noticeably faster, and was much more responsive. Starting up Dropbox, on the other hand, seemed to slow Word down dramatically, so it seems this this is the culprit. So I'm going to quit and disable the Dropbox daemon. (And for anyone else happening to read this thread: if you quit Dropbox, it seems that you then have to restart Word to get Word to work at a decent speed again.)
Thanks for the help,
Julian
Thanks for telling me about Dropbox. Quitting Dropbox also helps for me.
I'd appreciate if Microsoft could work out a solution here, because not being able to run Dropbox together with Word is rather undesirable. I know they're pushing their SkyDrive and what not, but many of us still rely on Dropbox. Microsoft, please solve this issue.
It's also not great that we all have to go off and examine what other apps are interfering. Can this not be avoided in the Word code?
Hi Rich,
Yes, mine looks just like yours:
Best wishes,
Julian