How to turn off the reviewing, editing, and view feature?

Our law firm has the same problem, all of a sudden. Old documents, new documents. Most with Read only documents, when another person has the file open, read only because to keep the original in place, but you could always type in it, just not save over. Now we can't even type in it because of changes with Office, not our environment.

We have always been able to type into a document, now when we open a document, What a person sees on the computer is:

greyed out Ribbon

“Viewing” dialog in upper right corner of Word.  You can only view this document, no permissions to edit it.

Lower left corner, “you can’t make this change because the selection is locked”

What update from Office caused this? These pop ups and notifications are new. Noticing many other people using Office Apps (365) are having this issue.

My Word version is: Word for Microsoft 365 MSO (Version 2208 Build 16.0.15601.20148) 32-bit

Thank you for your input,

Patricia Vrooman, Help Desk Support

Hancock Estabrook, LLP

My contact at Microsoft clarified that the fix that's released is only for the issue of not being able to copy from a document that is in View mode.

The update does not remove the button. I said that it is important to provide a way to turn it off, even if that requires a registry entry.

The answer it wrong - the message that says she does not have permission is not correct, Just because the file is protected by "ready-only" from accidental delete or overwrite does not mean she does not have permission to edit the file if she chooses to do so. If you could examine the properties and acls on her file you would see what I say is true. The problem is this new "feature" in word which disables the basic functionality of how word has worked for the last 25 years of its existence. Until now, if you opened a read only document you could make changes to the text loaded into memory and decide later what to do with it. That is the way almost all programs work on windows, both now and for the last 30 years. I am amazed that Microsoft is not embarrassed that one of their flagship products has such a glaring mistake in such a top level message.

The SVN system does not interfere with Word at all, it is just a repository to hold and check out documents. I have been meeting with my IT guys to troubleshoot to no avail. We both have the same version of Word, he can copy and paste from whatever document, while I cant from a view-only document.

How can I go back to the version of Word without these tabs? Again, I cant copy and paste from a view-only document to another one anymore without having the editing feature on. This is very frustrating for my line of work.

The file is in my company's repository called SVN. This is where documents are stored and we can lock them out to edit them when needed and see all the changes that were made to the document. Before, I could open a word document from SVN and copy/paste from it to a document I was working on without issue. When word added the editing/reviewing/viewing feature, I have to lock out every document from out SVN system just to copy and paste.

Is that what the feature was intending, not even being able to copy and paste from a read-only document? The document are not password protected, just in locked in our SVN system.

I have been trying to get a hold of someone from Microsoft to help me to no avail. Please help if you can, I would appreciate it!