MS Word will not drag-to-highlight

I had this same problem and spent ages on pages like this trying to get an answer. In the end I found a solution: I switched off my Mac mini, left it for a few minutes, then switched it back on again. Now everything works as normal... text highlighting/marking with the trackpad is back to where it was in Word and in Outlook. Whatever the source of the problem was, it's gone away.

I have been searching the web on how to fix this issue for the last few weeks and nothing was working. I can't believe all I had to do was restart my computer LOL. Thank you!!!

Reboot your Mac. Then try the highlighting process in the same Word document again.

My experience with Word v16.81 (on Sonoma 14.3) is that one first drags right to left to select document content, and then clicks the color (e.g. yellow) highlight button on the ribbon bar to complete the highlight.

I say "right to left" because if you drag from the left to select, there will be automatic, unintentional white space selected after the last selected text item.

Wow, same thing for me! My cursor started acting funny (blinking erratically) and then I noticed that I couldn't click and drag or use the 3-finger swiping motion on the track pad. I have so many documents open, I tried to deal with it. Then tried restarting Word and it didn't work. After reading this I restarted my computer and it is back to normal. Hoping it stays!

But it’s resolved for one use only—to drag again you have to switch off again

How to resolve this irritating problem?—

switching off and back on with my iPadPro only helps once.

Thanks! This was driving me nuts but your solution fixed it.

Susan Levenstein

There's a special forum for Word problems at

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_word-msoffice_unknown-mso_OPMac?sort=LastReplyDate&dir=Desc&tab=All&status=all&mod=&modAge=&advFil=&postedAfter=&postedBefore=&threadType=all&isFilterExpanded=true&page=1

I switched off and then back on and it seemed to solve the problem too, but no, the problem restored itself. Does one have to switch off and on every time?

Same problem, resolved same way (restarted my Mac). Running Sonoma 14.1.2 and Word 16.83.

No, I haven’t had to restart each time to reset it.