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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.
I have found disabling Add-Ins within Word 2016 speeds thing up very significantly.
From your main Word 2016 menu go to File -> Options -> Add-ins -> Mange-> <select the type of add in you need to disable> and click "OK"
Thank you. That is a very good idea, which may help a lot of the affected users.
On Surface Books however, it does unfortunately not solve the problem.
We just reproduced it on a brand new Surface Book, with nothing but Office 365 installed.
Our key account manager at Microsoft Switzerland confirmed that they suffer from this issue on their own Surface Books, but do not have a solution for it.
This is really crazy: Microsoft releases new features for Word that no one was waiting for and no one really needs at least once a month, while such fundamental and known bugs remain unsolved.
I have had this exact issue. Working on a 400 page book that is is 2.6 MB file size has become IMPOSSIBLE. I have a pretty fast computer (new i3, SSD, 16 MB RAM). Scrolling, using the arrow keys, typing...massively excessive lag and responsiveness.
However, I have SOLVED it for me. I hope this helps someone else.
Word 2016. I went into File > Options > General. From there, unchecked "Enable Live Preview."
BAM! Problem solved. Word is responsive. No lag. No delays.
Philip
This actually worked well for me. I tried other suggestions including looking at startup items which may be affecting performance, shutting down Dropbox, etc, but this suggestion actually made the program usable. Shame we have to go this route but it was unusable. Before, it took one second for the cursor to move when I hit backspace.
Thanks
Garry