I am being driven mad by the fact that as I type all will be well for a while and then, when I look up at what I have been typing (I type quite fast, but can't touch type), the cursor has somehow shifted to a part of the text way down the page and whole swathes of text have been written in the wrong place. I cannot fathom how the cursor jumps, often to a position in the middle of words in the middle of lines half-way down a page. This too in Outlook, where I use Word for creating messages.

My eyes are not quite what they were and it may be that I am hitting some keyboard shortcuts inadvertently as I type, I quite often manage to hit two keys together, but as I say, I can't imagine what keyboard shortcut would send the cursor down to these strange, apparently random page positions. If it moved to the start of a new paragraph or line or whatever I could understand it better!

Anyone else get this, and know what the problem may be? It's very frustrating. Is it possibly something to do with my touching the trackpad, though I am not aware that I touch the trackpad as I type. In any case I used to have the trackpad off when the mouse was plugged in and I don't recall that that helped. It's an Asus laptop, with Win7 x64.



Thanks.

The problem you are describing could be caused by an oversensitive touchpad. Have you tried turning it off and exclusively using a mouse instead? Re-reading the final paragraph of your post, I see that you may have already tested that, though...

Another thing to consider: inadvertently pressing a keyboard shortcut such as Ctrl+Up arrow (or Ctrl+down arrow) which moves the insertion point to the previous (following) paragraph.

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

I did, it didn't help as far as I recall :-( I could try again ...

Thanks

I had the same problem until I disabled touchpad in bios. Now I only use mouse, everywhere.

I'll disable the touchpad again - I can choose to do so in the Control Panel/Mouse options. I re-enabled it because when I come out of sleep mode, the external USB mouse can take its time waking up (USB!).