MS Word slowing down (beachball)

TidBITS Talk
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I am wondering if anybody else has experienced problems with Word (latest version - checked updates an hour ago) and MacOs Sonoma Ver. 14.5 on an M3 chip?

Word seems to work fine for a while when first opened but then, particularly, if I take a break (minutes to longer) e.g. to make coffee (not to open other apps) it’s worse than 'wading through treacle’ * and for some commands like opening, saving and closing files I get the spinning beachball for several seconds before the command takes effect. Similarly, something like trying to repeat asterisks to make a line takes ages.

I’ve tried rebooting my Mac, clearing junk with the CleanMyMac app to no effect. Well after a reboot / or a CleanMyMac run - Word works fine for a while again, but then for no apparent reason it suddenly slows down.

Any assistance will be gratefully received.

David

  • I’ve never actually tried to run through treacle but it’s what I imagine it to be like :smiley:
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Maybe Microsoft Update is playing up? I recently disabled this app from working in the background. Now every time I start Word it warns me that Update is not available - which I ignore of course. But maybe the latest Office updates are causing your problems.

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Thanks @mpainesyd - as soon as I finish this post, I’m going to disable the update app

PS are you in Syd(ney), Aus? if so, me too!

Update to above: There was definitely a problem there - when I tried to open autoupdate it wouldn’t with an error message saying it was “damaged” - strange because it worked a couple of hours ago …

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9to5Mac published an article a few days ago about recent performance issues with Microsoft Word:

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I don’t know if it’s the same issue, but recently I’ve been seeing Microsoft office apps on Windows periodically freeze, requiring an app-restart to recover. The problem seems to be related to synchronizing a locally-stored copy with a master copy on OneDrive or a SharePoint server. But it’s hard to say. I’m never doing anything fancy at the time of the hang - usually just entering new text or re-generating a table of contents.

I’ve recently stared turning off auto-save (so it won’t try to sync with OneDrive/SharePoint until I explicitly save my changes), but I haven’t been doing this long enough to determine if it is having any effect.