Word crashes with documents with "track changes" on

Word suddenly started crashing every time either

• a document with «track changes» is opened
• «track changes» is activated in a document and the document is changed

This behaviour started without an update of the OS or Office.

Edit This also happens activating the tracking on a new empty document. The behaviour is reproducible with each and every document with «track changes» activated.

The problem is not with the track changes and comments but how Word tries to display them: in a Balloon...

Luckily there is a simple solution:

Word -> Preferences -> Track Changes -> "Use balloons to display changes" 

remove the tickmark from here.

You can still see the changes inside text by checking the colors and use

Review tab -> Comments -> Previous, Next

to step through comments (the list will be opened at a left side sidebar). Convinient way although not so fancy, but at least: it works!

I had the same problem and in my case I was able to get past it by disabling Balloons - "Use balloons to display changes" in the Track Changes preferences.

If you don't show the gallery on startup and you can't open Word without it first wanting to reload the crashing file, then you may need to first remove the folder:

~/Library/Saved Application State/com.microsoft.Word.savedState