Why am I getting a pinwheel while working in MS Word?

This means that your computer is having trouble keeping up with the demands that you are making on the processor and/or memory.

A good place to start is to look at Activity Monitor, which is a program in your utilities folder, which is in your applications folder. Open Activity Monitor and then if you click on %CPU in the bar across the top, you will see what software processes are active and how much of your processor (the CPU) they are using.

How big is this document that you are using?

How much ram do you have?

How full is your hard drive?

You shouldn't need a ton of ram to just run word, but if you are running a lot of other programs at the same time that could be a problem.

Also, if your hard drive is too full, your mac won't work properly. Computers need some thinking space in the hard drive- virtual memory.

Why don't you take a look at activity monitor and see if you can answer those questions and report back.

You didn't say, but I assume since you posted here that you are running Mountain Lion. I hope you're running the latest version of Mountain Lion (OSX 10.8.2).

You may know that Microsoft Office 2011 came out for the Mac since Office 2008. However, I do think Office 2008 can run with Mountain Lion. My advice, however, is that when you have Word open, do a "Check for Updates" (located under "Help" in Word's menu) and make sure you install all the latest updates.

click on the %... at the top and it will sort them by which is using the most CPU.

So, at least when you took this picture, the processor was not being overly taxed. The next time you see the beachball you could look at this, and it might tell you what is going on.

So how much ram do you have and how full is your hard drive?

That should be more than enough space in your hard drive- it's only half full.

The 2 gigs of ram might be part of the problem. I have 8 in my laptop.

Is the document you are working on really huge? I had a similar problem before with pages.app, when I was working with a large document, and it was autosaving all the time. I think word has autosaving built in.

Well, no definite diagnosis yet.

The next thing I'd try is some routine maintenance, like repair permissions, and then repair your hard drive.

You repair permissions with disk utility (in Utilities).

For the hard drive repair, you have to reboot into the built in recovery HD volume. Here are some directions:

When to Run First Aid in Mountain Lion's Disk Utility - For Dummies

Couldn't hurt! Certainly you should do it at the first sign of a problem.

Try this it worked for me:

Went to Applications

Went to disc utility

Clicked on Hard Drive on left side of window

Clicked on Repair Disc Button

Ran for approximately 14 minutes,

While it was running noticed on one of the windows, "repairing, resolved"(numerous times)

And now tried copied and pasting from a website I had copied from in the past to see if that was a problem.

No pinwheel this time.

I hope this helps you cisquito🙂