Sorry but I have no idea what might be causing this problem.

On OSX the default is for text documents to auto-save (even untitled docs) but not sure that applies to MS Word in any case.

MS Word for OSX is a primitive beast. The text encoding it uses is incredibly slow and not always compatible with other text programs. I doubt the text encoding process has changed for MS Word in the past 35 years making MS Word a dinosaur in more ways than one. Copying a very large quantity of text between MS Word and other text programs might take several minutes (even up to 15 mins in my experience - also memory and cpu intensive) whereas other text programs can do such a massive copy-paste in a matter of 5 to 15 seconds. Also sometimes the text encoding by MS Word is incorrect and unusable when copied into another text program.

I recall back in the 1980's there were two competing word processing programs (WordPerfect and WordStar) very similar to MS Word and both were arguably as good if not superior and my preferred choice on the Windows platform. But these programs appear to have vanished. (When it comes to superior distribution and marketing, it's not always the best product that wins and eventually the better one vanishes off the market. BETA versus VHS video players was a good example except that also included patent issues.)

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