Flakey Mouse in MS Office

DoctorV

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I have MS Office running on my new (mid-2011) iMac (OS X 10.8) and my wireless mouse seems overly sensitive when I'm inside Excel, Word, and PowerPoint. Click-and-drag, e.g., to select an area in Excel causes the data to jump several columns before I can drag it. Selecting part of a drawing in PowerPoint can cause it to jump to the next page.

If I'm really careful, I can get it to do what I want, but is there a setting I can fix or some other solution? Thanks in advance.

PS I am a long-time Windows and Apple user. I've been using Excel on both for many years. I don't think this is my fault.
 
See if this works:

First try to rebuild you Microsoft database. Just quit any running Microsoft Office programs and then relaunch the Microsoft program while holding down the 'option/alt' key. A pop-up should come up to rebuild the database. Don't worry this won't delete any saved files.

PS - What version of Office are you using?
 
Thanks, SATCOMER. I'm running Office: Mac 2011, version 14.2.3.

I tried Word and Excel but no pop-up. Outlook, however, did raise the rebuild pop-up so I rebuilt it and then restarted (old Win habits die hard).

The same jumps occur when I select a group of cells in Excel. I selected a set of items in PowerPoint, however and it didn't jump! When I went down a page the mouse wasn't enough to get me back to that first page - scroll bar position suggested another page above, but it would not scroll up again. Went down to page 3 and couldn't get back up to page 2. Up arrow did the trick so I've got a work-around. My GENERAL Settings show "Always show scroll bars" and "Click on the scroll bar to jump to next page," though it doesn't do that.

Note that the jumpy Excel seems to look like a swipe, though I have Mouse Settings for Natural Scroll Direction, and "Secondary Click on Right Side," but nothing else is selected there, or under More Gestures.

Goofy, but I can live with it.

P.S. I was with Motorola before retiring and worked on the Iridium Project until they got absorbed by their SATCOM group way south of Phoenix - too long a drive. I really enjoyed that. After seeing a few other projects I wished I had moved with them :)
 
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Do you have any thing like better touch or anything else installed? I I asked because if that is an updated that could be causing the problem.
 
No. I'm not familiar with that product but it sounds like an enhancement to the mouse action. I don't have anything like that.

Note that the mouse works fine in Apple apps. It only gets flakey in the MS Office products - Word, Excel and PowerPoint. I keep hoping that an Office upgrade will fix it some day. I can live with it for now.
 
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