Wednesday, February 12, 2020

Set a document to open in view-only mode by default

Document productions and lifecycles come in many shapes and fashion. One scenario is sharing a document without the intent for the reader to necessarily make any edits or comments. To reduce the footprint of auto versioning and accidental edits of a document you have the ability to explicitly make the document open in view-only instead of in edit mode.

Other people may still edit and comment the document, but they must first make an explicit choice to do so.

If you didn’t know about this easy tip, here’s a video showing how you enable it using Word Online. The same setting is also available via desktop clients. If you already knew how, then you’re all set :)