is there a way to turn off the task bar on my MacBook Pro? It causes problems with Word

It is the "Touch Bar", not the Tool Bar 🙂

System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Keyboard tab -> Touch Bar shows -> Extended Control Strip

This will give you the traditional function keys that control brightness, multi-media, volume, etc...

If that is still not good enough, you can click on

System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Keyboard tab -> Customize Control Strip...

You will notice that the Touch Bar starts to "Jiggle". If you drag your mouse to the bottom of the screen and keep going, you will see that some of the Touch Bar icons highlight. You can Click-and-Drag that icon off the Touch Bar. Repeat for each of the Touch Bar icons and eventually your Touch Bar will just have an "esc" icon above and between the Tilda and Exclamation Point keys.

If you wish to put the icons back, you can drag them from the pallet to the Touch Bar.

Feel free to play with the System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Keyboard tab items.

By task bar I'm assuming you mean Touch Bar. I haven't seen any reports of pasting similar to your description and I don't see how that would be related to the Touch Bar. There have been quite a few complaints about the cursor jumping to a different location while typing but those are related to the larger trackpad on the 2016 and 2017 MacBook Pros.

You may want to check and/or post to the Microsoft Word for Mac forum to see if there are any ideas there: Results in Office - Microsoft Community

Since FoxFifth and I are a bit confused about what you mean by "task bar" when your profile says Mac OS X Lion 10.7.1 and you are posting in the Lion forum.

Could you give some more information on what is actually happening?

What kind of Mac you have? (Apple Menu -> About should give you that info).

If the Task Bar part of Word, or something outside of Word on the Mac.

Are you using the Microsoft Windows term "taskbar" to refer to the macOS Dock that resides at the bottom of the screen?

Like I said, we are a bit confused about what you are talking about.

Screen shots might help too (Command-Shift-4 - drag cursor over part of screen to capture - then drag the screen shot file from the Desktop into a Reply to this forum thread)

I'm not aware of a way to turn it off. I have a MacBook Pro with Touch Bar and use Word 16.11.1 and haven't seen any negative effect from it. You may want to reply with more details about the problem.

Good point. I was focused on where the conversation was started -- see top left of the screen: How to use the Touch Bar on your MacBook Pro - Apple Support

And I obviously am incapable of looking elsewhere on the screen for clues!

Most likely because your "Bio" says you are using "Mac OS X Lion (10.7.1)"

Click on your name at the upper-right corner of this page, then click on "Profile". On the page that appears, click on "Bio". At the bottom of the Bio page is "My Products" Update the default so that it says you are running High Sierra.

But, but, but, the Touch Bar is only on Macs that run Sierra and High Sierra? This is the Lion forum and patrickfromwilliamsville profile says Lion?