Word – Disable Printing “Markup” permanently in MS Word

microsoft wordprinting

When working on MS Word 2016 Documents I have to review and change each document several times and also keep a record of changes. The "Track Changes" option in MS Word is very useful for this purpose. But whenever I print the document it also prints the tracked changes. There is an option to prevent printing of markup each time when a document is printed but I need to disable this permanently.

It there a way to disable printing of markup permanently in MS Word 2016?

Best Answer

A practical solution should be very simple:

Before printing, tell Word to not display on screen the changes

Menu: Review --> Tracking --> Final [not: "Final - Show Markup"]

Now when printing, only what you see on screen will be printed; "markup" (e.g. red coloured new text, or red coloured stroke-out text) will not appear in print.

I would suppose you know that anyway.

You may find it annoying to each time go through the menu items to set that setting. For that purpuse I use the following minimalistic VBA procedure ("macro"): 

Sub TrackChangesViewToggler()

   ActiveDocument.ShowRevisions = Not ActiveDocument.ShowRevisions

End Sub

This toggles the seeting in question. Each time run, the setting changes (on-off-on-off...) I trigger this via keyboard shortcut (AltGr v in my case, but you can assign whatever you want).

If you need this only and solely for printing, I recommend: make yourself a VBA procedure that first sets that setting, then sends the document to your printer. You can easily record such a procedure without knowing too much about VBA programming.

Related Question