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

The Office Insider blog post that Yuhao Li referred to (Easily switch between editing, reviewing, and viewing documents in Word **** ) said that the feature was released in the version 2206 update in late June or early July. To remove it, it's necessary to roll back to version 2205, which I have done here from Microsoft 365 version 2208. After the rollback completes, it may be necessary to restart Word twice to remove the button.

Follow the instructions at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/how-to-revert-to-an-earlier-version-of-office-2bd5c457-a917-d57e-35a1-f709e3dda841 . The config.xml file described in step 2 paragraph 3 should contain this text:

<Configuration>

<Updates Enabled="TRUE" TargetVersion="16.0.15225.20288" />

</Configuration>

I am submitting this issue to the Microsoft Word development team in hopes that the feature can be fixed to work with document management systems and automated merges.

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

This is causing my company issues as our legacy system calls word via macros to generate documents, and is now not allowing it to proceed. We require an urgent resolution to disable this feature.

Please answer the question, how do we turn this feature off?

I agree that this new feature is stupid. When my users open documents from our document management system they are read only by default. Because Word now forces the document to be in Viewing mode they can't print using our print macros which adjust margins and insert letterhead. The option to switch to Editing mode is greyed out. A read only file should protect a document from being overwritten, not make it impossible to copy from or modify without saving elsewhere first! Dumb feature noone asked for!