Forum Discussion
evannfarmer
Microsoft
MicrosoftReview tracked changes with new cards in Word
Hi, Office Insiders! Kimberley Chua from the Word team is here to let you know that we’re now bringing improvements to Word for Windows and Word for Mac: new Track Changes cards!
New Track Changes cards
Collecting and acting on feedback about your document is a critical factor in creating great content, and the Track Changes feature in Word is an essential part of that process. Now we’ve added new Track Changes cards, which make it easier to review a change before you accept or reject it.
How it works
Ready to give the new Track Changes cards a try?
1. When working in any Word document that contains tracked changes and shows all revisions inline, click on a tracked change in the text.
2. Review the suggested change in the card that pops up.
Read the rest in the blog post!
Cheers,
Evann
Office Insider Community Manager
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So the Track Changes Card just showed up today January 22, 2025, after an update of Word. It does not work well for me and I very much wish to disable it. Yet research on various forums reveal there is not way at this time to disable.
One appreciates that MS is trying to make things better, but what really make things better is to give the user the ability to disable a "feature" such as this. I'm working with contracts, reports, all of which use track changes. The card does not make things easier at all. There are years of comments on this announcement, and yet the feature continues to be included without the ability to disable it.
C'mon MS.. Give the user the versatility. Don't impose on us.Please allow us to disable this in some way. My document has large changes, and the pop-up slows me down every time I click inside a change. This is not helpful, this is in the way.
Tracked changes Card popup. GET RID OF IT PLEASE!! At a minimum, let us turn it off! It gets in the way all the time! I have to leave tracked changes up/open for a long time until the changes are finalized and this Card gets in the way with editing. Please, PLEASE, get rid of this.
- Another vote for allowing users to disable this feature. I've yet to see even one positive comment about this.
Sorry, but this is just a terrible feature. There are already two ways to accept/reject changes (Ribbon and right-click). Having annoying popups appear while you're editing a document is disruptive and destroys productivity. It makes it impossible to read the document because the cards cover the document content. It also makes it easy to accidentally accept or reject a change.
Why does Microsoft spend time and money developing features that no one asked for and that make the product worse? Also, why doesn't Microsoft allow us to turn these "features" off? It seems that all of the new "features" are just gimmicks for beginner users who don't know how to do things already, and they trip up the advanced users who are very efficient and proficient with Word. Popups, "tool tips", "cards", "mouseovers" and "hover effects" are terrible UX for everyone. They are disruptive and cover the document content. We should be able to disable them all if we want.
- Another vote for an option to disable this feature. We often need to keep the tracked changes intact and not immediately accept/reject them, and the pop-ups get in the way of reading the text and reviewing the document. My users are tearing their hair out and losing productivity.
evannfarmer This is really annoying. It's preventing me from editing a document because I can't read the text behind the box, plus having boxes flick open all the time is distracting. This is ruining my productivity. Please tell me how to disable this. It should not be turned on as a default.
- Please make it possible for users to disable these popups. It is annoying especially when you are under a lot of pressure to get the work done in a very short time, and you get stuck with heavily reviewed documents and non-responsive app. This “impovement” is unnecessary, pointless, and an efficiency killer. And on top of that, you cannot turn it off…
This is really another terrible change in a long line of them which makes Microsoft products significantly worse, more difficult to use and is genuinely mystifying. Whoever thought this was an improvement cannot possibly have used tracked changes regularly - it's difficult to see what anyone thought the benefit could possibly be - the disadvantages are obvious. As many many others have pointed out, it gets in the way, is obtrusive unhelpful and adds nothing. If these kind of 'features' are to be added why oh why would there not be an option to turn off. Microsoft regularly roll out downgrades then extol the virtues of how they are ruining the product. Those who use it regularly get annoyed and the developers are paid again to fix the problem they created, if we are lucky. There's an ever-growing list of recent downgrades rolled out - modern comments, tracked changes cards, stupid-sized attachment icons in outlook, left click spell check, stupid pop ups everywhere - there may be one or two people who though they were a good idea, fine but for the other 99% of people, why can't we turn them off?! It's clear those who dream up these ideas don't actually use the products (if they did, there's no way the downgrades would have been rolled out at all, let alone without an opt out). evannfarmer
evannfarmerplease, please let us turn this off. I can'r read what people have suggested in my document because the blithering cards keep popping up. I don't work through a document accepting changes one by one, I read through them - reject the ones I don't like and then accept everything else.
And sometimes I need to keep the changes tracked so otehr people can see the amendments. And sometimes thats the case right the way through to documents being used in court.
If you introduce a disruptive new feature like this you MUST allow people to turn it off. Even the perpetrators of Modern Comments managed that eventuallyy.
