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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.
Ok Finally some hope. Had a horrible time working with office for more than 5 months.
The credit should go to Paulo for finding the much needed solution
"
Hello,
Freshly installed El Capitan and Word 2016 and ran into that same problem (note that I already had it on Yosemite)
Running on iMac late 2009 with SSD and 16G of RAM. Tested word document: 150K words, 70 pages
What appears to work for me is:
* in the preferences, disable /uncheck "Check spelling as you type"
* in the preferences, disable / uncheck "automatically correct spelling and formatting as you type"
The cursor was very slow right after I opened my document. Now, I'm still editing it without issues for half an hour.
My 2c.
Paulo"
UPDATE:
I recently upgraded to version 15.15.0. The sluggishness and high CPU utilization are still there for me... so I decided to experiment a bit.
I noticed that "Print Layout" and "Web Layout" were sluggish while "Outline" and "Draft" layouts were NOT sluggish (OK... on par with Word 2011!). After a bit more experimentation, I was able to determine that a 500 page document WITHOUT images exhibits "Word 2011" behavior... However, as soon as I add images (in my test case, that's nearly 1100 images) to the document, the response drops SIGNIFICANTLY.
In each case, I open the document and let it sit idle for about 2 minutes to let all the background processing complete before I start looking at responsiveness.
Still looking at variations that might have an effect on responsiveness.
Copying info from another thread.....
Just an update... am now running version 15.15 and am seeing same problems as before.
I've done a bit of detective work. It seems that the problem is worst when in "Print Layout" and "Web Layout" -- where images are displayed. When operated in "Outline" or "Draft" mode, the UI is as snappy as can be. Since text IS properly formatted in "Draft" mode (but not necessarily in "Outline" mode), text formatting doesn't seem to be an issue... it's more likely something with images.
This correlates with an earlier test I ran with a 1500+ page document withOUT images, which had reasonably snappy response (as good as Word 2011).
This test document has just under 1100 images and I'm going to do another test in which I remove ALL of the images. I'm GUESSING that this test will not be slow and laggy.
AND
Yet another update...
I FINALLY got my 1500+ page document to behave "normally" (i.e., like Word 2011) by doing the following:
(1) Remove a "DRAFT" watermark,
(2) Remove all headers and footers, and
(3) Remove all images.
This leaves about 10 sections, each having about a dozen tables, each table having anywhere from 3 to 30 cells, each cell having anywhere from 1 to 20 or 30 paragraphs of text. Apart from the crashes (about 1 out of every 5 tries), this version of the document works great -- this using Word 15.15.0.
JUST received and installed the NEWEST El Capitan update (10.11.1) which CLAIMS, among other things...
Now, why an OPERATING SYSTEM needs to change to improve compatibility with an APPLICATION sounds completely BACKWARDS to my understanding of computer science... HOWEVER, I will accept it on face value for the moment.
Anyway, I tried my tests as before, with Word 15.15 -- identical to the results posted above... generally crappy response UNLESS I remove all headers, all images and all watermarks.