MS Word lagging on 2020 Apple M1 MacBook Pro

I am also having the same issue and it's making MS word totally unusable. It is ONLY MS Word - nothing else and no other issues with computer performance in any other program. I've re-booted, reinstalled Word, cleaned up my disk and files, made sure that I"m only running Word and it's unusable. This is huge issue as I'm in the last couple of weeks of my degree along with full time work.

For more clarity - I have a 2020 MacBook Air with M1 chip running macOS Sonoma Version 14.5 - word is non-functional if I type a sentence - It takes maybe 5 min to slowly do one letter at a time and then freezes. I have reinstalled Word, I have tried saving the files to my hard drive, Onedrive and apple's cloud - all to no avail. MS word version 16.85 on an MS 365 subscription

Dear LJRSM，

Welcome to Microsoft Community.

We understand that after you update Word, word is showing a delay on your Mac.

Seeing that you indicated that you recently installed an update and then it appears that your Word program is delayed.

You indicated that you have reinstalled Word and tried to open the file by moving it out of OneDrive, but it still doesn't work.

issue, which may be due to compatibility information between Word and your system not being able to detect and run properly after updating Word on Mac.

We are concerned that the compatibility information is due to the Word update. To help you further confirm if the problem is due to Word loading information, we recommend that you try to roll back your version of Word first, and then see if you can reload or view the file information.

You can try the following actions to help you roll back your version of Word on your Mac to see if it alleviates the problem:

Rolling back requires reinstalling your Word program, and you need to back up your files first to avoid affecting your files during the operation and causing them to be lost.

And you can directly move your Word program to the “Wastebasket”, easy to wake up to delete and uninstall Word program information.

Once the uninstallation is complete, you can refer to the update history in the link below to download the previous version of Word and reinstall to see if it works:

Update history for Office for Mac - Office release notes | Microsoft Learn

You can try downloading version 16.84 or 16.81 or older to see if it works.

If it still doesn't work after you rollback the version, you can reply to us, and we will further help you to investigate the cause of the problem.

We look forward to your response.

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

Best Regards,

Zenobia.Z | Microsoft Community Support Specialist

Microsoft is aware of this bug and is investigating. Do you still get the hang?

Any word on the investigation?

I can't even get Word to run long enough before crashing at this point to copy and paste my documents to elsewhere or to print. I have important assignments due in the next few days and to say I'm stressed is an understatement.

Microsoft is aware of the problem and is investigating.

If you can get Word to run, please use the Help menu and choose Feedback > I Don't Like Something. That sends metrics about Word to Microsoft so they can gather data to analyze this issue.

You might try using Quit (Command-Q) of all open Microsoft Applications and then relaunch Word a couple times. That fixed the problem for some (but not most).