MS Word v 16.87 Running Slow on Mac

So have you updated to 16.88 yet? It was released some days ago.

Okay I think I ve found a solution. When I shut down "Dark mode" word dramatically got faster! Try that out.

We have 5 Macs running Sonoma and version 89 for MS-Word and all are working fine. But perhaps more telling, at work we have about 4,000 Macs all on version 89 of Word (updates are applied automatically and our work computers are configured so we cannot stop that) and I see zero posts on our Slack channel where issues are reported. People are usually fairly vocal about posting issues on our special Slack channel used for that. Many of our Mac users like using Dark Mode.

I will SPECULATE (since I do not have access to the Macs where people are reporting a problem in this thread) that something installed could be conflicting or causing the issue where Word runs slow. It might be instructive to try running Word with the Mac booted in Safe Mode, or to try creating a new vanilla generic user and running Word from that new user.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/officeupdates/update-history-office-for-mac I went back to 16.86 You only need to download the Word installer. Rem to first delete your current Word app from the applications folder in Finder -applications folder under your root disk not the application folder under users. Licence info retained, that elsewhere.

There's also traffic on the Microsoft site on this. Clearly some people are still having issues with 16.87 & 16.88 and can only work by going back to previous versions. I have yet to see anyone identify why some are having issues and others not. One piece of advice I saw on the MS site was this - "The first thing to do is to report the problem to Microsoft while it is happening. When Word is going slow, use the Menu Bar and choose Help > Feedback > I Don't Like Something. Using this feature sends information about the state of Microsoft Word to Microsoft. They can compare feedback with other users and see what's going wrong."

I knew about this feedback feature (and used it for this issue) but didn't know it gave a snapshot of the state of the program at the time. Hopefully it can provide those with the skill to fix this the info they need. In the meantime, for those who have no issue (like Ikrupp), they can ignore all this and chill. For others like me, I'll happily keep using the previous version that works and also chill until a fix arrives. Enjoy your day!

Update from my side. I updated to latest macOS Sequoia 15 and then updated Word to latest Version 16.89.1 and all seems to be working fine again. Hope it does too for those of you previously affected. Good luck.

It's worth sending feedback via the Feedback option under Help in the Word app - click 'I don't like something' then explain your issue. At least then it's received directly by MS.

You can launch the Spotlight tool via either control+spacebar, or from the 🔍 Finder menu bar. If you see the following with the oscillating blue indexing bar then you know Spotlight is on the prowl…

In the Terminal, you can also get a count of the mdworker processes that are currently running… and double-digits mean it is hammering the CPU cores during an indexing phase.

ps -ceo command | grep -c mdworker

I am using Word v16.87 on Sonoma 14.5. The hardware is an M2 Mac mini Pro with 32 GB RAM. I see no difference in performance with this version of Word than with v16.86 from yesterday. It continues to quickly open existing Word documents and converts a four-page PDF (with images) to DOCX as briskly as previous versions.

If Spotlight is re-indexing your drive shortly after powering up your M3 MBP, then it will have unleashed potentially 40+ mdworker processes that would slow Word or any other application until that indexing is done.

Having several RAM-hungry applications running (if that is the case at all) will not help Word's interactive response either.

Same problem after update to 16.87 on mac mini m1 16GB Sonoma 14.5 600 page novel ground to a halt after update. After two days of ****, reverted to previous version (deleted in application folder then downloaded previous version from official site) and back working fine. And as with other folk who have experienced this, I will remain on previous version until proven fix arrives.

running around the same probleme, downgraded to .83, now it works like a charm. MSFT is trying to push to .89. If anyone knows if this version fixed the problem, it would be really appreciated.

Regards

Launch Word, Under Help select Check for Updates. This will open the Microsoft Autoupdate app. Now click on Advanced and make sure the option for automatic downloads and installs is unchecked. I’m rather surprised you don't know this.

But I’m running Word 16.87 with absolutely no slowdowns. It launches with 2 bounces and opens documents instantly. So do Excel and Powerpoint, and Outlook. No issues whatsoever.

This may be off-topic, but I noticed that Word Version 16.87 (24071426) on an Intel iMac Pro with 3.2 GHz 8-Core Intel Xeon W; Radeon Pro Vega 64 16 GB; and 64 GB 2666 MHz DDR4 running Sanoma 14.5 (23F79) behaves differently from my Version 16.87 (24071426) on an Apple M1 MacBook Pro with 32 GB running Sanoma 14.5 (23F79).

In particular, my iMac Pro does not show the File/Preferences/General/ option "Enable modern comments" while my MacBook Pro does.

I guess I'm not surprised to see that there may be performance issues for some that others do not see.

Things like this should be shared with both. From the outside, we are only guessing what is going on. At a minimum, Apple needs to know about this to update the expression of their expected norms from third-party developers (as well as their own teams). I used the Feedback menu item under Help in Word and sent my observation to them as well.

Hi da La da, I don’t think so because I was having trouble just this week and I was using the latest version of Word. I used the link someone posted earlier in this thread to switch to an earlier version and no more problems.