Cursor disappears when typing in Word 365

Question

Hi. I'm having a problem with the cursor disappearing about halfway through my document when typing, or moving with the arrow keys. It works fine before this and works fine in safe mode.

I have tried the following possible fixes but none of them work:

• 'Hide pointer while typing’ mouse option is turned off.
• Copy the text to a new document and paste it as text only.
• Start Word with the /a option.
• Disable all add-ins.
• Remove the 'data' and 'options' sections in the registry.
• Run Office repair, both offline and online.
• Saving it as a ‘doc’ file.

The document is quite long with 151,000 words and 452 pages. The cursor stops working at different points in the document when I have tried different fixes, so it's not related to the content of the document.

I also found that when I zoom out to dispaly multiple pages, the cursor works all the way through the document but as soon as I zoom back to single page (110%) it stops working again.

Thank you for any help

Answer 1

You are joking? Reinstall Office for something like this?

Since the drastic and time consuming solution of an office reinstall didn't solve this I won't be trying that myself. I have Office 2019 and I have the same problem. I'm guessing that doesn't give me access to the O365 Support Team. What should I do having paid the full price for the software instead of paying the monthly fee or does my purchase not count?

Answer 2

Office 365 support team contacted me, and it made no difference, they even tried to make out that this was a feature. This is a definite bug in Word and should be fixed. It’s not specific to any document but to its size. What’s even worse is the cursor works when you zoom out to multipage view.

If it exists in Office 2019, then it sounds like it’s been around for some time so whether it will be fixed or not, I don't know. It makes editing my novel very difficult so I use LibreOffice now, which doesn’t have this problem.

Answer 3

Why does every help answer for Office 365 start with: uninstall Office. This is not acceptable for Customers any more. I spend a significant amount of time every month updating Office 365 and Windows and to uninstall and reinstall Office seems to take the best part of 4-6 hours, I do not have that time and in an organisation of 15 people that is 11 days work lost. If I were to continually have to rework papers and analysis I did for my customers I would lose my job. 

Microsoft has to learn that we are not the Guinea Pigs, that software needs to be sold and updates provided that work and do not add to the list of matters that need to be resolved next month.

Right First Time is a good mantra that Microsoft should take on board.

Steve

Answer 4

This entry from Michael13767 has been informative if for the only reason I've discovered I'm not the only one with this issue.

It definitely occurs in larger documents, as suggested, greater than 100+ words. The cursor is visible at the beginning of the document but then disappears somewhere in the second half. (I jump to the end to test this.) If I click with the mouse, I see the blinking cursor but as soon as I use the cursor keys to change position, or type something, the blinking cursor disappears.

If I zoom to 3 pages, the cursor remains visible. If I zoom to two pages, it disappears.

Today is November 14, 2020. I think I first noticed this phenomenon about a month or so ago. Maybe two.

A related observation

I have a large document, 200,000 words. When I first open it, I get "Not responding" for 15-20 seconds. If I jump to the end, same thing. After this initial delay, Word seems to find its way and responds quickly. But at that initial opening, Word seems to get lost and I have to wait through "Not responding". Like Michael13767, I thought of document corruption and copied and pasted with Notepad++ to create a new Word document. That didn't correct the issue. Since the point of this large document is to have a one stop, archived, searchable repository, I've considered moving to Notepad or WordPad but hate to give up the convenience and features of Word.

I also recreated the Normal template but that didn't correct the issue.

Answer 5

I was having this issue of the cursor disappearing when using arrow keys when working on Word office 365 with a large document (over 700 pages). I did not have this issue at work on a large monitor. When I started editing it on a small laptop, I encountered this issue. I discovered it was happening when I was zoomed in above 120%. The cursor would remain visible at 100-120% zoom. I don't know if that will help anyone.