Q: Mouse cursor in Word 14.3.5 turns light grey on MacBook Air

If you didn't follow the Microsoft instruction to the letter to remove Office 2011 from your mac then you really didn't remove all of it. So there was preference files left behind and are being used again with the new install.

I have exactly this same issue with a brand new MacBook Air. Really annoying!

Will report back if I find a fix.

Same problem here, also with a 2013 MacBook Air

13-inch, Mid 2013

Processor  1,7 GHz Intel Core i7

Memory  8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3

Graphics  Intel HD Graphics 5000 1024 MB

To all.

This is probably a problem with the newer intel graphic and the driver Apple has supplied for it. Probably nothing you can do until Apple updates Mountain Lion or Maverick comes out.

This has happened to me on my Macbook air - the italics cursor essentially disappears as it turns light grey in microsoft word over italics characters.  

My temporary workaround:  When I am editing italics, I hit "select all" (cmd-a) for my entire document.  This turns the whole document blue (or whatever your selected highlight color is).  The cursor turns into a solid arrow over the highlighted italics text (rather than light grey) and can be seen and easily inserted. 

I repeat this process each time I need to edit over italics since it just takes a quick second to cmd-a select-all highlight most reasonbly sized documents.

Nothing against WORD itself, since I use same everyday on both Win and Mac, there has yet to be any version of WORD in either Mac or Win that didnt have a very minor bug of some kind.  

I might make note of 10-15 minor bugs like this over at least 10 diff. versions of WORD on both Mac and Win

I have same issue. Spent a bunch of time yesterday with Microsoft in a remote session. Today more time with Apple in a remote session. No solution. I posted more details in a separate posted thread:

https://discussions.apple.com/message/22503382#22503382

Based on user feedback at least I can surmize my new MacBook Air is not unusual. Either a video hardware or driver issue with the whole Haswell product line -OR- an incompatibility Microsofts needs to address...

I have had the same problem in Word, and notice it happened in certain instances in Adobe Photoshop Elements as well.  The occurence in a non-Microsoft environment suggest a driver issue.  Any help or fix would be appreciated.

Great input! Can you detail repro steps for the Photoshop Elements issue? That would be helpful so others can confirm this.

Interesting that this now indeed points to be a video issue clearly in Apple's responsibility area, hopefully resolved with a video driver update. I just updated to the MacBook Air update released today and unfortunately, not surprising, the issue is still there.

Does anyone know how we can ensure Apple is reading this? (and hopefully working on resolving this...)

• If you are from Apple, please confirm your knowledge of this issue.
• If you know how to get Apple informed more surely/directly, please let us know.

When I open Photoshop Elements 9 (sorry, I'm not current to the newest version) I get strange cursor activity with different tools.  I used Photoshop Elements on my 2011 MacBook Air with no problems at all.  While the italics light grey cursor is a consistent issue on my new MacBook Air, the Photoshop issues seem to differ with the file I am working on.  If I have a file open with layers and a transparent background, and I select the text tool, anytime my text tool cursor hits the invisible background, it goes light grey but it turns back to black when it passes over any visible layer.  Like in Word, this makes it extremely difficult to see where PSE is going to make a text layer because you can't see where the cursor is.

Another issue on one of the image files, that I wasn't able to recreate because I could remember the file, but when I select eraser, the eraser tool, rather than showing the circle it normally shows so I can see what I'm erasing, it shows up as a strange cross hairs.  I know PSE usually shows cross hairs when you move the eraser down to a small point, but it was doing a crosshair when the eraser point size was extremely large.  Therefore, I could tell the center point of the eraser, but I didn't know how far out the boundaries of the eraser would go.  I kept having to try and if it was too large, I'd undo and try a smaller size.

Anyways, I hope that helps.  If I can find the file I was editing and can give more information I will.  Thanks again for any help.

Did you install the altest update from Apple, which was supposed to fix some Photoshop related (screen flicker)  issues?

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1672

I Have the Same Problem in Quark 9.51!!!

the cursor is only light grey and extremly hard to find in the document!!!

Apple please fix it!!!