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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. Only working with .docx format, even from mac word formats. And mac is the latest and greatest. So there is no legacy issue here.
Nothing irregular on CPU usage - below 5%. Mem show a big draw (.5 gig) on something called System and Compressed Memory - whatever that is.
Otherwise, still have the problem with the latest version download on my Office 365 account.
is it safe to have both installed at once?
Yes. I have 2008, 2011 and 2016 running side-by-side in El Capitan without problems. The only restriction is be careful about starting more than one version of Outlook at a time, or you may be unable to find your email.
Also, i use numbers/pages for a lot of my work now because the 2011 Office software sucks on El Capitan.
Be careful of Pages and Numbers. Their ability to open and work with Office files, and to export back to the Office file formats, is excellent. But they make a horrid mess of the internal formatting property stores (the style tables) which may cause problems with Microsoft Office.
Hope this helps
Hi,
I have a relatively similar problem, in that word is just always laggy. However, I believe I have found a fix. It is as follows:
I have absolutely no idea why this works for me (and hopefully everyone else), but I think it is an issue with Word communicating to graphics cards. If anyone could let me know why it works, that would be great!
Don't forget to mark this is as helpful or as an answer if it was!
I hope this helps!
Thanks,
Reece Coombes
In my case turning off checking the spelling and grammar 'as you type' in Preferences->Spelling helped with all the lag I had experienced before (it got quite terrible in larger documents in which I scrolled around much).