Word 2016 Cursor movement slow, jumpy, laggy, erratic, stuttering in some documents

I am not quite sure what you are referring to: but it sounds a bit scary to me.  Exactly which of the XML files did you remove?

The "XML file" in a Word document is the "Contents".

All of the text in the document is in a file named "document.xml".  If you remove that, you certainly won't have performance problems: you will have an entirely blank document!

Hope this helps

I had the same problem with office 2016 for Mac. I had to log-in into office for Windows, where I knew that the "Inspection"  works. I "inspected" the document and removed the xml file. It now works smoothly.

I hope it helps for you as well.

Guys:

After speaking to the Word developers and Product Managers at Microsoft, we learned that this issue was largely a CPU scheduling issue.  Too much power was being allocated to the Proofing engine (spelling and grammar) and not enough to the display updating.

That was adjusted in one of the first updates released for Word 2016, and that fixed the issue for most folks.

It does not occur here, in a 500-page book.  This is also a Macbook Pro with 16 GB of RAM and a Core i7 quad-core processor.

However: the fix simply re-allocates the distribution of available resources, it does not make your Mac run faster, or make your document easier to work with.

So if you have applied the updates and it's still slow, we need to look to see where all that power is going.  People are on the right track when they suggest switching off the spelling and grammar checkers, because these do suck quite a bit of power.

Another useful strategy is to re-start the computer, so there is plenty of available memory. On a busy Mac that has been running for a few days, there can be plenty of "free" memory, but it is scattered all over the RAM in tiny slices. By re-starting, you clean out the RAM so the free memory is available in large contiguous blocks.  Word will perform best if it can lay your entire document out in memory as one contiguous file.

Then minimise what other applications are running.  Check your Startup list: if you have 20 or 30 "helper" applications starting at bootup, switch them all off.  Each application that is running takes a slice of memory, even if it is not doing anything. Each running application is interrupting the CPU every few milliseconds to see if there is anything to do.

Be aware of applications that like "real time" access, such as iTunes or video applications.  A friend of mine loves to run a streaming music site and a streaming video site while he works, then wonders why his Mac is slow. Those kind of applications do their business at very high priority so you don't get gaps in the playback, all the time interrupting Word in its work. Remember, a CPU can do only one thing at a time, no matter how many cores and hyperthreads it has: these are just techniques to allow it to complete its work in tiny time slices so it can give the appearance of "multi-tasking".  It's still doing only one thing at a time, just task switching very quickly.  But if you have "real-time, high-priority" applications running, the CPU always comes back to them first, so there can be quite a pause before Word gets any time.

Another thing to be wary of is "Document Complexity".  I can get acceptable performance out of Word up to around 5,000 pages in a single file, PROVIDED it is not full of complex things such as tracked changes or floating graphics. Each tracked change potentially causes Word to re-read the entire file to work out what to display. Lots of tracked changes towards the very end of the document will cause Word to get very slow.  Similarly, pictures or tables that "float" above the text (anything with its Wrapping set to anything other than Inline with text...) cause Word to re-read the file multiple times, once to work out where to put the graphics, then again to work out where things moved with the graphics inserted, then a third time to show the effect of having the graphics in place.

One strategy that will improve your mileage on long and complex documents is to work in "Draft View". Draft view has been around for years to enable us to deal with just these problems.  It was originally developed as a "power-saving" view back when computers were very feeble, and it still saves huge amounts of power.  For example, it switches OFF the pagination engine, which is one of the most power-hungry parts of Word.  In Draft View, Word will recompute only when it has to. Draft View also degrades the WYSIWYG by using only two fonts for everything, suppressing the typography, and showing a view that is "close enough" but not accurate.  Well worth learning to get used to and use Draft View if you work on long and complex documents.  It takes a little getting used to, the appearance is quite different: only the things an author or editor needs to see are shown.  But it is a LOT faster.

Another strategy I use always is to work without change tracking.  I keep a copy of the original, and use Compare Documents to highlight the changes after I have finished. If you encounter a slow document, make two copies.  Reject all the changes in one, and keep that aside as your "original".  Accept all the changes in the other, and use that as your working copy, with tracked changes turned off.  This technique is likely to be the answer to the problem for most of you: tracked changes are a serious gas guzzler...

Another thing to watch out for is file format.  The obsolete .doc format is very slow (and unreliable, that's why they changed...).  And the bigger a .doc gets, the slower it goes.  Remove all the tracked changes and save it out in .docx: it will speed up quite a bit. And be aware of the freeware word processors ...  if you flip a document back and forth between the freeware wordprocessors and the obsolete .doc format, your document will become glue-slow...

Hope this helps

Duane,

I'm so sorry to hear that. In my Mac, it is very clear that the problem is the grammar and spelling checker. I'm now keeping it off all the time. Microsoft has released an update since I published my fix, but still didn't help me. If I turn all the grammar & spelling options ON, my documents become "unworkable".

I hope you can fix your system soon.