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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.
So is the general consensus that the 2016 Mac issues are fixed? I Reverted back the 2011 software back in October due to the issues but would love to switch back to 2016.
John,
I agree that your suggestions will make Word faster, however, there are times when they CANNOT be implemented!!!
For example, we create documents for clients from CUSTOM TEMPLATES. We then send draft Word documents -- including embedded images, tables, charts, headers, footers, and watermarks -- to the clients for approval and they return the draft with modifications implemented as Tracked Changes. We then have to step through the document -- in FULL "Print Layout" view -- and either accept or reject each one, and are sometimes also ADDING new material at the same time. Often these steps have to be performed a number of times, and for the last couple of cycles, we are often right up against a deadline -- sometimes mere hours. Having Word perform poorly under this set of circumstances can cause us to miss deadlines, literally costing us jobs (after having put something like 90% of the work into it already).
On the bright side, I HAVE noticed that turning off spelling and grammar checks, AND turning off watermarks SOMETIMES results in considerable speedup. It's just not consistent... this may help on one file and not on another, even when both were created from the same custom template!
John McGhie,
I did see improvements after the last update release. I had even thought the problem was completely solved after I started editing a new file. I switched on all G&S checkers, still had a good performance. Then once I opened a larger file that has more than 40 pages, like you did with your 500-page book, everything crashed immediately. Then I turned G&S checkers off, everything was back to "normal" again.
I agree that there might be other things involved with the poor performance of Word 2016, but it's very clear the G&S checkers are the main culprit. And it has to do with the document length or number of words as well.
"That was adjusted in one of the first updates released for Word 2016, and that fixed the issue for most folks."
Is that also true for Windows?