Forum Discussion
Text Boxes Have Been Acting Weird Recently
I have a user who has been using text boxes in Word for many years. Today she showed me that when she types in one text box, the text affects another text box. On top of that, sometimes when she types in a text box, a second line will replicate her text for a little while. I made sure she didn't have linked text boxes before coming here.
I am not able to upload the video screen recording to show you.
Is this a bug?
8 Replies
This is a known, odd bug in Word, often caused by graphics driver conflicts or a corrupt temporary file.
Quick fix: Go to File > Options > Advanced and check the box for "Disable hardware graphics acceleration." Restart Word. This usually stops the text replication immediately.
If that fails, try repairing Office or deleting Word's normal.dotm template.
Thank you for the reply. Unfortunately on a Mac (Office 365), I do not have access to Advanced options including "Disable hardware graphics acceleration." I have however deleted and reinstalled word and I have also deleted Word's normal.dotm template. None of these have resolved the issue unfortunately.
The only way I have managed to work is to toggle the size of the textbox/show formatting marks after every character I type in a textbox, which is crazy.
Same issue here. I tried to reboot the original Word configuration but doesn't work either.
Hope this will be resolved soon as I fear all Word files opened during this issue will be permanently corrupted.
I have the exact same issue. After downloading word onto my new Mac, my existing document with textboxes suddenly has this issue, when there were no issues with that document before. Happens in new documents with new textboxes too. Very frustrating.
I have exactly the same problem. I tried all possible tips and tricks..but no luck. Even my IT department was not able to solve the problem, so I had to use my own private PC with Apache OpenOffice to complete my work. Pretty embarrassing for such company as Microsoft.
Try some of the workarounds I mentioned above. They should work in Word for Mac as well.
There is an ongoing display issue with text boxes. It is being investigated by Microsoft, but it is not yet known when we can expect a fix.
There are some workarounds available: Toggling nonprinting characters (click the ¶ icon on the Home tab) or resizing the text box will fix the issue, at least temporarily. A more permanent workaround is to save the document in the older *.doc format.
Take this:
- Copy Content to a New Document
Try copying everything except the text boxes into a fresh Word document. Then recreate the text boxes manually. See if the issue persists.
- Disable Hardware Graphics Acceleration
Go to File > Options > Advanced > Display and check “Disable hardware graphics acceleration.” Restart Word and test again.
- Start Word in Safe Mode
Run Word with no add-ins by holding Ctrl while launching it, or run winword /safe from the Run dialog. If the issue disappears, an add-in is likely the culprit.
- Check for Updates
Make sure Office is fully updated. Sometimes these odd behaviors are patched quietly in updates.
- Inspect the Document with Open XML SDK Productivity Tool
If you're comfortable with technical tools, this can help identify hidden links or corruption in the document structure.
