Please stop the revisions pane from appearing automatically when going through tracked changes
Please add option to stop the revisions pane appearing when you are going through tracked changes. When you click on 'next' to go through the changes this revision pane appears and obscures the text that you are trying to check. There needs to be a way to prevent this as it has no purpose. All changes (deletions, inserts etc) are visible on right hand side of screen so I don't need another list on the left hand side whereas I do need to see the text so I can decide whether or not to accept the change.

53 comments
-
Anonymous commented
This has got to be the stupidest feature of all time. What's more, when you click on a comment to expand it, it pops you over to the utterly useless revision panel on the left, and not to the point of the comment you seek, but just the top of ALL edits EVERY TIME.
-
Anonymous commented
I was trying to eliminate "Revisions" on the left side of Word and Googled it to find this topic. I agree that this revision does not add any value by duplicating what a balloon states. This version is so annoying.
-
Anonymous commented
The reviewing pane adds nothing and clutters the screen.
-
Mike Harper commented
This really kills the application when editing a large document and seems pretty much pointless. Heather's solution below worked though for me (thankks!)
-
Anonymous commented
This worked for me in Mac v. 16:
Turn off track changes
Select "All Markup" and UNCHECK formatting and ink
Under "Balloons" select "show only comments and formatting"
In the Review tab (ribbon), make sure the "reviewing" button (icon) is DE-selected -
Anonymous commented
When trying to type a new comment using the reviewing pane, or should I say "pain", a message is displayed at the bottom of the window "you can't make this change because the selection is locked". Sometimes it allows me to type in a comment and sometimes I get the message. I've tried all the suggested fixes below, going back a year, and nothing works to stop the reviewing pain from appearing and slowing things down. Hello Microsoft, are you listening? BTW, I'm using a corporate system and tried to fix this issue through our IT group.....no luck.....I'm stuck.....
-
Benny Skogberg commented
Its even worse. I can't get it to go away. What on earth are you doing?
-
Jana commented
Word sucks now because of the reviewing pane... I want to work on comment in the bubble !
The problem is that if the comment is long (does not have to be too long though) than you can not see the whole comment in the bubble. You will see ... instead the most of the text. Clicking on the ... does not allow you to see whole text in the bubble and work on it (as one would expect) but will open the f..king reviewing pane.My solution I am using is to change width of the bubble to 20 cm (or more). It works but still there should be better way.
-
Anonymous commented
I found a fix. Click on the show markup drop down menu in the tracking section of the ribbon and you should see balloons. That menu will have an option to say show revisions in balloons. That fixed it for me!
-
LHPink commented
SO annoying! Not very easy to understand, gets in the way, takes time to load - there's nothing good going for it. The only way I can cope with it is to minimise it as much as possible - but I have a large screen so I have the room to.
-
AFA commented
I think I found a fix in Office 16. I found that it was happening only when I clicked in one particular comment bubble. I must have inadvertently clicked "Reviewing Pane" in the Track group when I was in this bubble. I like to toggle between All Markup and No Markup a fair amount, so it could have happened when I was doing this. Trouble was, when I opened up the doc again and clicked in that bubble, the Reviewing Pane popped open and was open then no matter which comment bubble I clicked in. What I finally did was to cut the text from the "offending" comment bubble, paste it into Notepad to remove formatting, delete the comment bubble it came from, and create a brand new comment bubble in its place, pasting the text into the new comment bubble. This appears to have worked.
-
The Purple Poetry Lady commented
Came to this page hoping to find help, no dice. I offer a hack to deal with it if you are a macro power user. I have a macro mapped to Alt+1 to insert a new macro at selection point. I just figured out how to get rid of that stupid pain of a pane in the macro:
Sub insertComment()
'
' insertComment Macro
' [Alt+1] to insert comment at current cursor position
'
Selection.Comments.Add Range:=Selection.Range
ActiveWindow.ActivePane.Close
End SubIf I were actively working with revision marks, I'd wrap the Accept/Reject Changes options I used as keystrokes anyway, and just add that second line in--it's not perfect, but it saves mouse/keystrokes, which is what I need when grading.
-
Anonymous commented
THIS SUCKS!!! Why did MS Word add this revision bubble that pops up automatically every time I want to make a comment? It's USELESS and ANNOYING. For the love of Gawwwddd -- AUGGGGHHH!!!. Phew. I feel better unloading my 1st Wor[l]d problem. Thanks.
-
Michelle commented
@YM Thank You!!
-
Kp commented
Yes, please. As Rachell noted, this pane is intrusive and unnecessary - EVEN when a certain type of change is configured as "hidden" - if I wanted to see it, I wouldn't have marked it as hidden in the first place.
-
YM commented
This worked for me: turn off whatever needed to be turned off in the Review tab (namely, expand the Tracking to get to the Track Changes Options, and set Reviewing Pane to "Off"), and then -- and that's the important bit -- SAVE the file and CLOSE it. Then reopen, and the problem is gone.
Without saving and closing it, the settings always reverted to that annoying behavior of the revisions pane appearing automatically. However, somehow saving and closing it actually made the changes to those settings take effect.
-
Xyz commented
Thank you Heather, your solution worked! Was so frustrated.
-
Rob commented
Is there ever going to be a day that Microsoft actually listens to these comments and do what people want? This is apparently going back four years and to no avail. Do we have to all be major corporate customers to get some attention on this? Or are even they screwed by this?
This is just completely unsatisfactory. Fix this NOW.
-
Heather commented
I *may* have just found an answer. Go to the Review tab on the ribbon. Expand the tracking sub-tab. Go to "Balloons in All Markup view show" and select "Comments and Formatting". Mine was set to "Revisions" making it impossible to turn off the reviewing pane. Hope this works for others.
-
audres commented
Phil commented the solution is to turn off comments and markup and simply accept all changes in the document. This is not a viable solution if you want to review each comment and decide if it is a change you truly want to accept. Please provide a function that allows the user to disable the review pane. It is making it almost impossible to edit one page, let alone a multipage document.