Forum Discussion
Word Online (Web version) auto deletes text
When typing on Word online (web version) using a mobile device (Galaxy S22 Ultra, Tab S8 Ultra, iPad Pro (M1), etc) Word will randomly start deleting all of the text typed. For example, you start typing a sentance, and you hit enter, it deletes all of it. If you hit backspace it deletes all of it. Sometimes it deletes portions of it.
I have noticed that it seems to happen during the "Auto Save". I'll be typing and i see the autosave message come up and that is when it deletes the text.
I have tried this on Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, and Samsung Internet browser. I have tried it on Safari for the iPad Pro, and it has the same effect on all of them. If you are wondering why I want to use the web version of office instead of the application available for Android and iOS, its because selecting text in the app is horrible.
You cant highlight text by putting your mouse cursor up to it and then selecting it, then dragging the cursor to select the text you need. It's incredibly frustrating to sit there and try and highlight some text 100 times without it being effective.
I use Samsung Dex which is a great tool for getting more out of the phone. I would happily use the native applications for Office if they allowed text to be selected properly.
As mentioned i have tried several browsers, across iOS and Android. I have restarted the phone (and tablet) and factory reset the phone (twice) and the tablet (once), and the iPad (twice) thinking it is something with the devices, but clearly that isnt the case. (Even skipped restoring the phone from a backup altogether once just to make sure i didnt contaminate it with previous data)
If anyone has any idea on how to address this, please let me know. If anything get Microsoft to fix the web version of Office for mobile devices.
29 Replies
As from a moment a soft is released on a specific platorm, would it be online or via an app, we expect it to work, full stop.
There are hundreds of thousands of students around the world using the Mircrosoft suite or online version that is supposed to work on a tablet (to take notes at the University for example) - only valid reply to this post would be one from Microsoft informing it has been fixed
;-)
You will have to send feedback using the portal at https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback .
Microsoft developers do not read these forums.
P.S. It has been clear from the start that Microsoft puts more effort to the desktop applications for Windows and MacOS compared to the web and mobile versions. Of course, priorities may change over time.
I've been fighting this issue for almost 2 years now. Unfortunatly, I've just gone to google Docs when I need to create a word document.
And I thought I was the only one to face this issue. I have also reported to Microsoft, but they did not tried to fix yet after many years.
You should be able to use the mobile apps instead of the browser versions of Word, Excel etc.
Captain here. I HAVE THE SOLUTION!
Thereˋs something called user agent responsible for telling the website which browser youˋre using. If you change your user agent to make it seem youˋre accessing the word wonline webpage from a windows / mac computer, it works properly.
Iˋm on Android, so for the iPad folks, youˋll have to search how to change the user agent a ios supported browser. At least on Android, Firefox and Kiwi Browser are possible, but my recommendation is to use the Samsung Internet. And here it goes the step by step:
- Open Samsung Internet (also works on the Beta version)
- Type on the URL box: internet://urls/
- Click on the 3 stripes on the right top corner -> settings -> debug settings (this option only appears when youˋre on the internet://urls/ page.)
- Click User Agent debug settings -> Custom UA string. You can now input a different user string of your choice. Hereˋs one you can use: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/125.0.6422.186 Safari/537.36 OPR/112.0.0.0
- The different UA string is only applied when you select the "mobile site" view option.
This setting goes away when the browser is closed, so you can make the app stick to memory on Android by selecting the "keep open" option when you click the recents button -> long press the app icon. When you close the browser or restart the device, youˋll need to repeat the steps above.
Flies away.
Hey!
Does this solution still works for you? I tried doing that on my S9+ running Samsung Internet but the option won't show up. I'm yet to try doing it outside Dex though.
I have the same issue on Ubuntu Linux 22.04 with the Word browser in Firefox, when pressing enter to go to a new line the text got deleted.. To fix this I downloaded Brave browser to work in MS Office Word, this worked for now.
"Found a solution": I swapped Office for Google Drive. It works great on the tablet and windows. Plus, Google's cloud service is soooooo much better (at least on android). Onedrive keeps failing transfers for me and the mobile app is a complete joke.
I waited 6 months for a fix. 6 months..........
- I am experiencing this issue as well. I am using an MSI laptop, firefox browser, on Pop_OS! 22.04 linux distro, I have reinstalled the entire OS and the issue persists.
- Same problem here, no solution found yet.
oliveiram10 I have this problem too. Have you been able to fix yours?
hello, LeeBr1310
I have not found a fix. Reported it to Microsoft as well and has-been heard a peep. Just use my PC now...
- Report this using the feedback facility in Word Online (see https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/how-do-i-give-feedback-on-microsoft-365-2b102d44-b43f-4dd2-9ff4-23cf144cfb11#platform=Office_for_the_web).
- I have the same problem sice a month or so. This wasn´t an issue at all.
Have you found a way to fix it? Word online has been very unreliable on mobile and the Android app won´t let you select text with a mouse. What a joke.GabrielGon Unfortunately I have not found a way to fix it, other than reverting to using my PC to work on Word documents... I sure wish Microsoft would do something about it.
It is a real pitty Microsoft is not moving a single finger about this ...
We are talking about MS Office online on a tablet .... which is widely used over the world
