Disappearing cursor

Question

I'm using Word 2010.  When scrolling forward, backward, up or down (i.e. using the arrow keys), the text location marker (the vertical bar) disappears until a half-second after I release the arrow key.  As a result, I have no idea where on the page I am while I am moving the marker.  This is true whether I'm trying to move three or four spaces, or three or four pages.  This happens about 75% of the time, the rest of the time I can see the marker as usual, then for no apparent reason it will disappear again again when scrolling.

This is not:

A mouse issue (I'm not using a mouse)

A touch pad issue (it's a desk top with no touch pad)

Peculiar to this machine in any way (it happens on my office and home computer)

A memory issue (this happened on my older versions of Word when I was running lots of stuff simultaneously, but these are new machines and Word is the only thing running).

Any advice would be appreciated.

Richard

Answer 1

I spent the afternoon talking to a microsoft representative who looked at this problem within the document I was having this problem with.  He diagnosed the following problem:

"This happens only with this document and its a document specific issue"

A problem was caused by the document having a change in "the word spacing options etc."

This can be caused when retained formatting from an outside source is copied into the existing document whose spacing options are different from those in the original document.

Therefore the solution was:

Copy the entire document into a new, freshly opened, blank document, leaving behind ALL the formatting.  DO NOT transfer any of the old formatting to the new document. 

After the "text only" is copied into the fresh document the cursor resumes its proper functioning and can always be seen as it should be when using the arrow keys.

Then manually reformat your document the way you want it to be formatted. (Font type, font size, tabs, italics, line spacing, etc...)

Any new text you copy and paste into your document, make sure you paste it as text only without its outside formatting or you run the risk of recorrupting your document and losing your cursor again.

This is the only way to get your cursor back. 

For me it was worth it to do, as I am working with the same 300 page document for several hours per day for several months of the year.

Answer 2

A workaround  is to change the Style of the entire document.

Go to Home tab, click on Change Styles {on left}, under the Style Set menu, select a predefined style set.

I selected the default "Word 2010" style and got the cursor back.  All of the default styles seemed to work ok.

Answer 3

Try deleting the data registry key. For more information on the location of the registry key and how to access/delete it, seehttp://support.microsoft.com/kb/921541

Answer 4

Thanks for the thought.  It's two different computers (different makes), one of which is 1 month old, both of which are all up-to-date.

Answer 5

Not sure if this will fix it, but ensure that you have the latest drivers installed for your graphics card.