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Share your documents for review in Word

Feature deep dive
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Hi, Office Insiders! We are Kimberley Chua from the Word team and Ihcene Cheriet from the OneDrive team. We’re excited to introduce a new capability that enables you to share a Word document with others explicitly for review.

Review mode in Word

Working together on a document involves multiple people who have different contributing roles. Some are full contributors who own the document and need to be able to make any changes they deemed necessary. Others are only invited to review the content and offer suggestions for improvements.

Review mode in Word was created to serve the specific purpose of bringing more control and transparency to the process. It allows you to share documents with others based on the role they play in the development of the document.

What is Review mode?

When you open a document that was shared with you for review, you are automatically placed in Review mode.

In Review mode, you won’t have full edit control but instead are allowed to add suggestions to the document in the form of comments or tracked changes. Document owners or other collaborators who have full edit permissions will then need to approve the incorporation of any suggested changes to the document.  

Word document with tracked changes in Review mode

How it works

  1. To share any Word document for review, click the Share button, and then click the Share command in the menu.
  2. In Word for the web, Word for Windows, or Word for Mac, add the people that you want to review the document, and then select the Can review option.

Email link dialog box

Note: You can also access this option under Other settings in the Link settings dialog box.

Link settings dialog box

 

Anyone who receives a document that was shared with them for review will open the document in Review mode.

Availability

Review mode is available to all users in Word for the web, and to all Beta Channel, Current Channel (Preview) and Current Channel users in Word for Windows and Word for Mac.

The ability to share a document for review via the Can review option is rolling out to all Word for the web users. It will soon also rollout to Beta Channel, Current Channel (Preview) and Current Channel users in Word for Windows and Word for Mac.

Don’t have it yet? It’s probably us, not you.

Features are released over some time to ensure things are working smoothly. We highlight features that you may not have because they’re slowly releasing to larger numbers of Insiders. Sometimes we remove elements to further improve them based on your feedback. Though this is rare, we also reserve the option to pull a feature entirely out of the product, even if you, as an Insider, have had the opportunity to try it.

Limitations

Sharing a document for review currently only works on documents that are stored in OneDrive/OneDrive for Business. For documents that are stored in a SharePoint library, the file permission settings for the library will take precedence. This means that users who have read/write permissions to a document would open in Editing even if a link was shared with them for review.

Feedback

We are actively working on this feature, and your feedback is key to guiding future improvements. Please select Help > Feedback to tell us what you think. Thanks!

 Learn what other information you should include in your feedback to ensure it is actionable and reaches the right people. We’re excited to hear from you!

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