My Cursor Keeps Turning White in Microsoft Word Without Typing

Anonymous
2022-08-15T21:33:58+00:00

My cursor keeps turning white in Microsoft Word 2016 (I bought lifetime access), even without typing. I already tried changing the cursor settings so that it wouldn't disappear when typing, but that didn't do anything. After a few seconds the text selection cursor will turn white, and, if I hover over dark text, I can see the cursor outline. This has been happening in multiple documents, so not an isolated incident.

This started after a Microsoft update which forced me to log back into my Microsoft account to use Word about a week or two ago. I've tried everything I can find on the internet, but no luck yet. It's very hard to get work done if I can't see my cursor in Word, so what do I need to do to fix this issue so I can get back to work?

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2022-12-03T13:59:23+00:00

    Your guys inference are quite helpful. I have also done some research on my colleagues' PCs; following are conclusions.

    1. AMD GPU drivers may be blamed, no matter a integrated or dedicated card. When AMD GPU is the only effective GPU, this issue happens.
    2. This issue only occurs on Win11, it ok on Win 10.
    3. This issue relates to multiple overlay function of the GPU.
    4. I have contacted AMD supports , waiting for reply.

    More detail and discussion can be found on AMD community.

    https://community.amd.com/t5/drivers-software/text-select-pointer-goes-to-being-white-colored-when-hovering/m-p/559078/thread-id/164111

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  2. Anonymous
    2022-11-08T02:55:02+00:00

    I found the common solution for this problem in Word, Edge and Chrome. Just turn off the hardware acceleration, but the software will become slow than normal.

    This a workable solution but not complete.

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  3. Anonymous
    2022-10-19T17:22:17+00:00

    I also experienced the curser turning white in my Outlook text fields. It's remarkable how frustrating this simple issue can be. Our company is using Microsoft 365 Apps for Business on a Nutanix AHV VDI running Windows 10 v21H2. Reading everyone's comments I looked at my mouse settings in Control Panel. I noticed that my mouse had a Scheme applied on the Pointers tab. Since I usually don't run optional settings my impulse was to select (None) from the Scheme drop menu. Well, my curser is back to normal in Outlook!

    This worked for me and I hope it works for other people as well. Thank you to everyone who pointed me in the right direction. I appreciate your comments.

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  4. Anonymous
    2022-10-12T22:23:51+00:00

    No, it's not the Windows theme that needs to be switched, only the Word theme (which carries over to other Office apps). And I realize that this is not a fix, but a workaround, it's just that we don't have any other options right now. Image

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  5. Anonymous
    2022-09-23T21:06:04+00:00

    Microsoft customer support and I spent 9 hours going over this over a month ago before they gave up by telling me that rolling back the updates would help. They even allowed me to screenshare the problem and still nothing worked. This happened with two support agents over the course of those 9 hours.

    Nothing has helped over a month later, and Microsoft is pretending this isn't happening so they don't need to service a still functional 8 year old product. Have to get more 365 subscribers somehow...

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