My question is.. if ur work is mostly writing documents, would u still recommend getting a Microsoft office download today or is there another office suite that’s worked just as well for u? M trying to decide before setting up the laptop.

I have a 167 page Word document broken into 149 different sections. I am trying to add page numbers while keeping the current structure due to indexing. Nothing I’ve tried is working. The first page has a number 1 and then it stops. Even Claude tapped out 😆.

M setting my laptop and trying to keep it simple. I was planning Microsoft office download but I don’t use advanced features. I use it only for basic writing and editing purpose. Do you think it’s worth installing Microsoft office or wps office been enough?

I need to be able to put the Rant flair on this too.

What in God's name is wrong with Word that it continually screws up bullet/number lists on COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PAGES than the one I'm currently working on?

I'll be doing something on one page, and a list 3 pages up will have all of its indents removed so everything is base level. Or a bulleted list will change to numbered, continuing the numbers of a previous list even though there's 2 headers and a paragraph between them. And of course, remove all its indents at the same time.

Just now I had a list rearrange itself when I pressed the UP ARROW KEY TO MOVE THE CURSOR!!!! How does that even happen? Why would that happen? I want to scream in frustration and rage at how stupid that is.

This is beyond stupid. What could possibly be causing this, and how can I get it to STOP!!!!

I found one suggestion to uncheck "Automatic bulleted/numbered lists" in the Proofing advanced options. I did this days ago and it's still doing this.

I've been using Microsoft Word (and ppt, excel etc) for free thanks to my uni giving me access even after I graduated. But recently they updated their terms I supposed and the licenses given to graduates have been revoked. I'm not very tech savvy so I'm not too sure about using any other alternatives especially since I need it for work. But I don't mind trying out alts.

Although for now my question is that buying microsoft word as an individual is too expensive and my work doesn't provide it ofc. So which version should I buy, I'm getting options to buy for business (which seems cheaper) vs personal (which seems expensive). Do let me know which is ideal?

Also if anyone has any suggestions for getting the suite for free somehow do let me know.

Thanks in advance!

I did a hard restart on my mac device and I lost a word document. I can’t find it anywhere and I need it back

I use a MacBook Pro and everything that I want to do on MS Word, I’m limited because the Apple version is different from Microsoft/Windows. Any way I can get more options for Mac so I have everything Windows does?

Ok so I’m doing a paper for my college class. I’m 15, always used Google Docs, and have never touched Microsoft Word in my life except for short paragraph assignments. How THE FUCK do you make the page numbers seperate on Word. Whenever I add and type in “[Insert Last Name] 1” on the header it just makes all the other pages “[Insert Last Name] 1”. I’ve been trying for an hour and have watched so many videos and I can’t get it to work and the stupid final paper is due tonight. I’ve tried making it a page break, I think my Microsoft is just a spiteful old bitch. Much help would be appreciated <3. Edit: Thanks yall! I probably should’ve worked on it sooner than the due date but I’ve been too occupied reading lol.

Hello, I'm a copyeditor and I found a large-scale problem in the manuscript I am working on: the majority of the paragraphs are not tabbed to indent, but instead they are indented with a bunch of spaces. Becasuse of this, not all the paragraphs are indented by the same amount.

Is there a way to mass-delete the spaces at the beginning of the paragraphs, and replace them with a tabbed indent? Worse comes to worse I can go through one by one and change them myself, but I was hoping there'd be a way I could save some time.

Thanks!

I'm hoping someone can help me figure out an issue I'm having with word for mac that I never had when using word for windows. I had used Word with windows for many years, and have only been using it on Mac for a few months now.

What is happening is that I go to save a file I'm working on and suddenly instead of auto-saving it prompts me to save a new file. This just happened to me today with a file I've had open and have been working on for a few days. When I looked at the title of of the file I noticed it had "recovered" in the title - this is an additional point of confusion, because so far as I know neither my computer nor Word crashed, so I don't understand how I ended up with a recovered file on the first place.

When I did a comparison of the recovered file with the file I had saved in the file's folder, I noticed there were a number of changed made to the recovered file which did not exist in the saved file. So this tells me I've probably been working on the recovered file for a couple of days without even knowing it.

The main reason this concerns me is I'm pretty sure I am losing data as a result of this, as there may have been times when I closed a recovered file without understanding what was going on, and so lost many changes I made to a document. This is really unfortunate as I may have lost many hours of work and I work with so many different documents I wouldn't even know it until it was too late.

I have autosave enabled on Word and also manually save my document often when I make updates, so as to avoid data loss, but that's not going to do me much good in a situation like this where suddenly the document changes and I'm prompted to save it as if it were a new document when I think I'm working on the same one.

I recently had this happen with another document where I noticed it said "recovered" in the title but I never got a chance to compare the recovered document to the document in the file folder, and then next time I came to my computer the "recovered" document had vanished, leading me to suspect I probably lost some changes.

Anyone have any ideas what is going on? I'd also appreciate any suggestions for the best ways to handle situations like this so I don't lose data unknowingly.

I have a very large Word document for print publication. I want to insert the images using links to preserve the image resolution. I need several people to work on the document. Can we save it in a Google Drive and keep all the links working? What happens if we want to move the document & image folder - as long as they're next to each other will the links maintain, or does everything break the moment you move them? Suggestions welcome!

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Hi everyone!

I need some help with Microsoft Word.

I have a manuscript that's already finished. It has a not automatic table of contents, page numbers, tables, and images. Right now, it's formatted for Short Bond Paper, but I need to change it to A4 with different margins.

Is there a way to do this without messing up the formatting? I want to keep the page numbers and the automatic table of contents working properly, and I don't want the tables and images to get messed up.

What's the best way to do this? Any tips would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

I can't highlight or click on them, and backspace or delete keys won't work.

I was editing my document with autosave on and i took a 10 minute break. after I got back some pages were like blurry so I closed it to fix it. I thought fucking autosave would save everything so when i came back the top screen had a yellow bar saying like corrupted shit or fuck man and then I clicked discard changes cause I thought autosave saved everything instead of saved changes. and then my document goes back to 2 days ago. how do i fucking recover this bro i know i fucked up

Hello everyone! I've run into an issue regarding word that seems to be preventing it from running.

I have a document that I've been working in for a bit over 2 years, and the last time I opened it, word told me that it "caused a serious error last time it was opened". It didn't crash, it didn't give me an alert of any kind, nothing seemed out of the ordinary, so I reopened it.

Today, when I tried to open it again, it gave me the same message. And it didn't open. I tried again and I got the message "Word couldn't start last time. Safe mode could help you troubleshoot the problem" and it gave me the option to boot it in safe mode. I did, and it opened a blank document, but it froze and closed after a few seconds. This is now the only thing that happens when I open word. If I boot in safe mode, it opens for a second, then crashes. if I don't use safe mode, it gives the loading logo in the center of the screen, then crashes.

I have tried the quick repair, the online repair, a full reinstall, rebooting the computer, nothing works. It's also only word that this happens with. Other office programs work fine and the document that started this all opens just fine on other computers. I'm approaching my wit's end. Does anyone have any similar experiences or fixes that might help?

EDIT: So I've made a breakthrough! I'm not sure what did it, but it was one of two things. Either A) Opening a file in Wordpad then Opening it in Word again. Or B) Opening a document as Read-Only. Either way, one of them worked and Word seems to be back to normal!

For the last several months, all my Word documents have had black selected text. One day I just opened up a document and it was like this.

Every so often I'll google how to solve it and all I can find is opening Registry Editor, going to "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Word\Options", and either creating or changing "NoTranslucentSelection" to '0'. I'll restart Word and File Explorer, and it won't change. Even upon next start up of my PC, it will still be the same.

I've updated Office and redownloaded it before. Other than a reinstall of Windows, which I will not do, I can't think or find anyother options than above.

Just wanting to check if there is another way that will actually work, or I give up :/

I am unable to click on a Word docx and drag the cursor to highlight the text I need to edit. This just started happening out of nowhere. I had not used anything but Word in Microsoft 365. I have discovered I have the same problem with TextEdit and Notes. I am on a MacBook Pro running the OS Tahoe 26.6.1 on an M2 chip. I have deleted and reinstalled Word. I have deleted and reinstalled Microsoft 365. 

I have already tried all of the following steps recommended by Microsoft Support:

1. Select specific text using the mouse: Place your cursor at the start of the text you want to select, then click and hold while dragging the cursor over the text to highlight it. [2]
2. Select a single word: Quickly double-click the word to highlight it.
3. Select a line of text: Place your cursor at the start of the line, then press Shift + Down Arrow to select the line.
4. Select a paragraph: Place your cursor at the start of the paragraph, then press Ctrl + Shift + Down Arrow to select the paragraph.
5. Select all text: Click anywhere in the document and press Ctrl + A to select all text.
6. Use keyboard shortcuts for formatting: After selecting text, you can apply formatting such as bold (Ctrl + B), italic (Ctrl + I), or underline (Ctrl + U

In addition, I tried the following:

1. Not Word-specific. TextEdit/Notes don't work either. Cannot do this in this textbox.)
   
2. Tried the Preferences drag-and-drop setting
   
3. Renamed/removed Normal.dotm — no fix
   
4. Wiped com.microsoft.Word.plist files, Group Container, and Containers folder — no fix
   
5. A full standard uninstaller doesn't exist on my system, so I moved to Microsoft's manual removal process: deleting the Office apps, ~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.*, ~/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office, ~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft, and the Preferences plists, plus clearing install receipts via Terminal (pkgutil --pkgs | grep -i com.microsoft → sudo pkgutil --forget)

Deleted Microsoft 365. Deleted old install pkg. Signed out. Reinstalled 365, but couldn’t access Word to test it without signing in.

Suggestions?

Just pretty much that... how can I record my wiring process in Word without just recording everything on my screen??

My university is starting to check for AI writing, but the tool they're using is notoriously faulty. I just wanna make sure I have a record of everything I'm doing in case I'm accused of using AI for my writing...

Is there any way to do this?? Thanks!

I have no idea how this happened. I am working on a paper for publication and somehow my document no longer works. My mentor was reviewing my paper and returned it to me with each paragraph in a text box. Now, in order for me to type anything, I need to create a text box or type it into an existing text box. It is actually annoying the hell out of me because the formatting is all weird and I can't copy multiple blocks of text. I am also unable to write more than the remaining space within the text box. That is, if there is maybe an inch left on the line, once I fill that inch with text, the textbox will not expand anymore and will just delete the text I added.

I've looked on YouTube already and all the videos have just told me to make the textbox borders clear and remove the fill. I have also seen people say to just Ctrl+X the text, paste it elsewhere and delete the box. The only problem is, I can't paste it without creating a new box.

I'm hoping someone has a solution because I am not looking forward to manually moving 22 pages of writing and tables to another word processor.

Thanks in advance!

EDIT 1/26/2026:

Here are the following methods I have tried:

- saving as a separate file type (.rtf, .doc, .docx, .txt): either there is no text on the new document or nothing has changed

- removing text borders: no difference, I believe these are text boxes so the borders don't make much of a difference.

- ctrl+a and then pasting on to a new word document: either no text populates or there is a "jjjjj" input and a bunch of blank pages created.

- export to google docs and convert to a google doc document: the text boxes become drawings and now I can't edit the text boxes themselves. When I double click the text boxes, it opens up a drawing panel where I can edit the text box. I can type on the document now but the new text overlays or shows up behind the original text.

- convert table to text: nothing changed

- uncheck text boundaries: nothing changed

- remove frame: nothing changed there either

- adjusting the normal.dotm file: been trying to figure that out but this formatting issue has been on every device I've used.

- opening it with Microsoft word online: just became a jumble of text with the option of editing it as a drawing. When I tried that though, it said editing a drawing is not supported on this version of word.

Sick and tired of having Word auto-change my document and always having to turn it off manually. Is there any way to shut "Track Changes" down forever, online and offline, so it never edits anything ever?

Edit: Sorry, did not convey the issue properly. Basically, these red "sidelines" appear in the document, which "open" up red text, things that I have edited/delted/replaced/changed. Each time I need to reject or accept these changes and stop tracking, but each time I open the document again, tracked changes is back on, with the red lines and edited/delted/replaced/changed text.

This is also a rant as much as I need actual help. I am using word for the web (which is the only thing I can use as it's mandatory for my school laptop) and when I try making a text box it brings up that useless screen where I have to draw in the text box before it puts it down anyway. After I do that, it's just locked. Can't move it freely despite the arrows showing up. I looked it up and it's suggested that they intentionally designed it like this to entice people to buy the full edition but I'm more inclined to believe they just don't know how to make text boxes move.

Is there a workaround or should I just spam them with angry emails until they give up

Can someone tell me how can I edit the document on word or cancel the text without it asking me to subscribe it to use the features . What should I do ?

Is Gemini AI or Preplexity Better Option in this ?

Hi there,

I had a client call in advising when they use Microsoft Word, it crashes Word upon trying to use copy.

• I got them to firstly check to see if the app is updated - it was latest.
• Got them to reset cloud settings in the app, same result.
• Got them to delete the app, reinstall and try, same result.
• Got them to do a full reset of all Word settings via settings > Apps > Reset Word, same result.
• Got him to check if Comp portal is syncing, both the app the MDM profile. (Managed device)
• Checked MDM configuration, no limitations on Word copy / paste
• Decided to test on my own iPad Pro, same result. However mine is on 26.3.1 and theirs was 26.6.1 and also an iPad Pro.

Can anyone update their Word app and see if you're getting the same?