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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.
The 2011 and 2016 versions of Office were designed to be installed together. I've been doing so for about 8 months now and have had no problems with interoperability. I set the 2016 versions of Excel and PowerPoint as the default for the .xls/xlsx and .ppt/pptx file types, respectively, and set the 2011 version of Word as the default for .doc/docx file types. And, I can use a different program (or version) on a particular file by using "Open with..." instead of simply "Open". The only "problem" I see is that only the 2016 versions show up in LaunchPad.
I'm curious about your 2011/El Capitan statement though... I have been using 2011 for years, and migrated to El Capitan shortly after it was officially released. The only thing I noticed was a few more "spinning beach balls" than before with Word 2011. And almost every document I edit has hundreds of pages, each with numbers; multiple sections; table of contents; watermark; and many tables with images in each table cell. (Of course, late last year I upgraded to a new 2015 MacBook Pro with SSD and much more RAM, so any performance problems may have been offset by the upgrade.)
Hi Duane:
For your benefit: Word 2016 is ported PC code, whereas Word 2011 was re-written Mac code. The problem we faced was that Mac Office was getting further and further behind with missing features, because the cost of re-creating each feature in native Mac code was just becoming absurdly uneconomic. All of the Carbon code that was ported up from the pre-OS X versions became a massive liability, and then Carbon went away.
So Microsoft made a very sensible decision to port the PC version of each application to the Mac and iOS, rather than continue to try to write and maintain different versions. This work is vigorously underway currently (which is why you are seeing updates nearly every month). The missing features now are not because the product does not have them, but because they have currently been turned off because they don't yet work right. Yes, we would all like it to all be finished and work perfectly on release date. I would also like to win the lottery.
So what you have is multi-threaded PC code that has been ported from Windows, and is not especially well optimised for Mac OS X yet. Eventually it will be: as soon as they can.
In the meantime, the core problem is "excessive resource demand on the computer". It's not JUST the spelling and Grammar checkers: it's ALL the code, all running together. It's currently sucking too much power. And the CPU scheduling of the threads is currently not optimised.
Some things are making it worse in some documents. Lots of unresolved tracked changes is a key culprit: each tracked change causes Word to rebuild the file in memory, from scratch, to display or not display the effect of the change. Complex structures (floating graphics in floating tables of split or merged cells, I am looking at you...). Watermarks (which are just a running header, but they have to be re-computed on each page...). Lots of citations, lots of cross-references... Word's performance depends totally on the COMPLEXITY of the file: how much computing does Word have to do to display this file? It's not what you eventually see on the screen that counts; it's how much computing and re-computing did we have to do to get to that. Size has nothing to do with it: Word won't start to slow down until a document contains about 2,000 pages, and it will remain useable up to around 5,000 pages, provided the internal structure of the document is simple and clean.
Now: For serious work I use a Mac Pro with 32 GB of RAM and a RAID array. The Big Macs are not that expensive these days, and people in danger of getting fired or losing customers if their projects do not meet their deadlines (me, for example!) might like to avail themselves of the tools that were designed to do the job.
We should recognise that Apple's obsession with aesthetics (and I love Apple's aesthetics...) has resulted in the sale of a few models that could only be described as under-endowed, for business use. Yes, every time I pass a MacBook Air in the Apple shop I drool just a little (disgusting sight...). But I don't buy one. Because it won't do what I need to do. The thinner they get, the less room there is for cooling airflow. Leaving the fan out saved a few millimetres of thickness. But it results in CPU and memory that gets throttled back as soon as it comes under load. Same with the iMacs: yes they are nice and quiet because those fans hardly turn over: but they roast their CPUs and memory and result in the whole motherboard getting throttled back.
Yes, the Proofing Engine (spelling and grammar) does impose quite a load on the CPU and memory, and turning it off may regain enough power to provide acceptable performance. But so will removing all the tracked changes before sending the document out for the next round of revisions. Yes, learning to work in Draft View is a bit of a cultural shift: especially for designers. But you do NOT need to see how the document LOOKS until you have FINISHED the text changes. And it saves a LOT of power.
Microsoft is working very hard to make this thing into a product people will love. And being pulled in a dozen different directions while they do that. I know: I was talking to the guys and girls at Redmond a few months ago. It will be some time yet before they are done and all the code has been fully optimised for the various platforms. Those of us who do software development know very well that right after it all works is when the hard work really starts!
My guess is that it's going to take them about two years to have this thing performing the way they want it.
In the meantime, we need to adjust the way we work to fit within what it can do, rather than sit there hating it for what it can't do. Word 2011 is a little faster on complex documents than Word 2016. That's because it doesn't HAVE half the features the PC version has. If it's enough for you, I recommend (and often use...) it...
Yes, Word 2016 performance will improve. Dramatically. But not next month!
Hope this helps
is it safe to have both installed at once?
Also, i use numbers/pages for a lot of my work now because the 2011 Office software sucks on El Capitan
I would NOT say that the issues with 2016 Office for Mac are "FIXED". From what I am reading, quite a few users CONTINUE having the problem, even though, recent updates (especially 15.17.1) have made life TOLERABLE for some of us. Unfortunately, I am in the group that has SEVERE problems with MOST (but NOT ALL!!!) files. In my case, the problem is most severe when I have images embedded inside table cells (about 90% of my documents). However, I can write a SIMPLE document (several sections, watermark, table of contents and index), even one that is 2000+ pages long (over 4.5 million words) with no trouble at all... as long as I keep the number of tables to a minimum and have ZERO images embedded. It's an extremely annoying issue that is quite puzzling to me... and I have more than 30 years of software development experience!
At this point, I would suggest TRYING Office 2016 for Mac to see IF you have the issues... just DO NOT REMOVE Office 2011, so you will have a fall-back in case of trouble. :-(