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

a similar problem--cursor disappears in italicized text on my new Macbook Air.  Now that I realize it's only in itals, I can work around it, but would like Apple to fix soon.

Hello! There have been two updates on the Word software since I purchased my MBA in June 2013 and to the best of my knowledge, these have not addressed this particular issue. One can only hope. . . .If you discover a better work-around than the ones which have been posted in this thread, please let us all know. Thank you.

I have Apple Care, so I started a chat with a technical rep and asked him to follow and follow up on this discussion.  I included the discussion link in my chat. Maybe if more of us do this they may pay attention?!

Apple is replacing the SSD on the MBA sold between June 2012 and June 2013. http://www.apple.com/support/macbookair-flashdrive/

Maybe the cursor problem will get resolved when it reaches the same scale.

Experiencing the same problem here.... Increasing the cursor size does not work within word. Tried a number of different fonts, no difference. It would be great to have a solution soon-- this is a major inconvenience for anyone doing serious editing work!!!

Same problem here! New rMBP 15" running Mavericks. Cursor light over italicised text. Please fix.

Having just today migrated from the 2012 11" Macbook Air to the 2013 model (both having the same software - Mavericks, latest Office 2011 updates, etc), I also saw this issue on the 2013 mba, googled it and found this thread. From the length of this thread it sounds like it's been an issue since the 2013 machine was released, presumably something with the 2013' model's video driver (no issues with the 2012s).

now it's getting really weird... during all the tests and adjustments to see this annoying cursor in italic texts, i had the idea to connect my mba 2013 to an external display by airplay. i connected my mba with my samsung tv via airplay. first in the mirror mode and then in the expand mode it was the same. in my open word document on the mba display the cursor appeared correctly within the italic text part in the word document... so now i don't understand anything...

I didn't bother to update my 2013 Air to 10.8.5, but I had the issue at both 10.8.4 and at 10.9.0.

It's looking like it's common to all the Haswell Macs that use the HD 5xxx integrated graphics chip. Now that the iMacs and MacBook Pros have been updated, I did a little playing around in Word 2011 in the Apple Store yesterday, and managed to reproduce the disappearing/very pale grey I-beam cursor over italics on the following machines:

MacBook Air 13-inch, Mid 2013 - Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 5000 1024 MB

MacBook Pro Retina, 13-inch, Late 2013 - Graphics: Intel Iris 1024 MB (HD 5100)

iMac 21.5-inch, Late 2013 - Graphics: Intel Iris Pro 1024 MB (HD 5200)

The 27-inch iMac on display was fine (black I-beam cursor over italics), but that uses an NVIDIA GeForce GT 755M 1024 MB. I didn't get a chance to test the 15 inch MacBook Pro as there were only two in the store and people using them constantly, but I'd expect it to behave similarly, with the low end model with integrated graphics having the issue and the high end one with the GT 750M being fine.

Misery loves company and all that, but hopefully with a bigger affected Haswell population out there this problem will get a greater focus. I've seen some suggestion that apps have their own custom I-beam cursor, which may mean that it's down to the likes of Microsoft or Adobe to fix that, but since the behaviour only happens with the new generation of integrated graphics, clearly there's a graphics driver issue for Apple to fix in there too.

Nope, happening on my new 15" rMBP with dedicated graphics.

Although, the graphic switching may mean it's only using integrated so behaves the same way as other machines. I'll have to look into it.

Darn. The graphics switching is one reason why I'd really like to have done the test with the 15" rMBP. Definitely worth seeing if you can force Word to use the dedicated graphics card if you do find it makes the problem go away though.

Definitely integrated graphics problem. I confirmed this by turning on and off 'automatic graphics switching' on my new rMBP 15" (with dedicated graphics) and the issue ONLY occurs when running through integrated graphics.

Hope that helps with troubleshooting!

Shmootz5, I am sure that is a helpful bit of information. I am a Mac user with little sophistication. Would you be able to tell users like me whether or not it would be possibly to turn off the automatic graphics switiching (and turn on the "working" alternative) and, if that were possible to do with WORD, how would this switchover effect my word processing experience in general?

I mainly use the Word program for editing in several languages in my work (all languages have the same Italics issue, of course).

Thank you for any further advice!

Same problem here.

MBA Hasswell, 13", used to run on Mountain Lion now on Mavericks. Same problem on both - cursor turns to an almost invisible shade of grey when over italics in Word 2011.

And I have a brand-new iMac running the latest Mavericks. I had the disappearing cursor problem in Acrobat 9.5. Some of the editing tools work, but most are almost invisible. I hope there's a reasonably easy fix.