MS Word – Bug – Cannot Turn Off Design Mode

The Problem

I was revisiting an old word document which included some Content Controls.  I would

  • Open the document
  • Enable Design Mode
  • Disable Design Mode (or at least try to)

and would receive the following error message

Word cannot turn off design mode because placeholder text in a content control contains invalid items. Placeholder text cannot contain items such as floating objects, revision marks, or content controls. Remove these items from the placeholder and try again.

  • How is it there was no issue creating the document many moons ago?
  • How is it this error occurs even though I haven’t made a single change?

 

The Workaround

Workaround 1

I’ll never know what is the actual cause of the problem, but I may have a solution, at least the following worked for me.

Long story short, I was curious to know if turning off Design Mode through VBA might resolve the problem.  So I tried using :

ActiveDocument.ToggleFormsDesign

but it had no effect strangely enough.  So then I tried just seeing what state VBA considered the document to be in and tried

? ActiveDocument.FormsDesign

and low and behold, it switched back to normal mode and deactivated the Design Mode.  I can’t explain it, but it worked.  I’ve used it on multiple documents and it works!  So simply open the VBA editor (VBE) and use the above command in the Immediate Window.

Workaround 2

In the comments below, David Jaques-Watson brought another workaround that many seem to find resolves the problem.

I had this problem start when I had “Track Changes” switched on. …

I found that if I “Accept All Changes” in the document, the problem disappeared.David Jaques-Watson

You can read his full comment below.
 

The Root Cause! and Solution

I did some more tests, created a few new documents and tried various operations trying to identify the cause of the problem and I finally figured it out. When I created my Content Controls, I deleted the placeholders. Apparently, Word has a tantrum if this is done and gives us the error message quoted above which is less than useless in this scenario! The solution is:

  • Use the VBA workaround provided above
  • Simply enter a space as the placeholder text

So we’ll file this under, yet another, Microsoft BUG! because once upon a time, when I originally created the documents, this did not pose a problem, but today it does, so at some point in time Microsoft changed things and created this issue. Furthermore, nowhere in any of the documentation relative to placeholders have I found any mention that it cannot be blank/empty. So either the documentation is incomplete or there is a bug in which you cannot have an empty placeholder.  Then add to that a useless error message, like the one shown above, and you get the current mess.

17 responses on “MS Word – Bug – Cannot Turn Off Design Mode”

  1. Adin Pilcer

    Same problem; got the result by creating the new controls in a clean new document, then pasted them into the legacy document (both docx, Word 2016).

  2. David Jaques-Watson

    I had this problem start when I had “Track Changes” switched on. Prior to that, I had no problem switching into and out of Designer Mode.

    This nearly drove me nuts, and led me to this page. 😉

    Overnight, I had a brainstorm. The clue: is “Placeholder text cannot contain items such as […] revision marks”.

    I found that if I “Accept All Changes” in the document, the problem disappeared. :-O

    I figure that MS Word must add revision marks as hidden control characters inside Content Controls, and these are incompatable with the Content Controls themselves. Like trying to Escape an Escape, sort of thing.

    Anyway, now that there are no revision marks in the document, I can again switch into and out of Designer Mode. Hope this helps someone!

    1. Viv G

      Could not work out why I was getting this error message when I had used the design mode over and over before. This time I was converting an old document from hardcopy to electronic format, and turning off the Track Changes worked brilliantly for me. Thanks for this simple solution 🙂

  4. Ryan

    Track changes was the problem for me. As soon as clicked ‘Accept all changes’ I was able to turn off Design Mode. I have now lost my changes record though :'(

  5. Bill

    I was revising a Word 2010 document using track changes and had the same problem described in this article. Once I accepted the changes, I was able to choose Developer, insert a dropbox, choose Properties to make my changes and then turn off Developer. Everything worked fine….

  6. Michelle

    Found a solution. Go to Developer tab, click Visual Basic. Unclick the Design Mode icon (looks like a pencil with a protractor and ruler).

    1. CK

      Thank you! I found this turns off the tracked changes in the document too, so if you are tracking changes make sure you turn it back on.

  8. MeLinda

    I found if I save the document and close. When I reopened the Design Mode was closed and the applicable fields worked correctly.

  9. Lia M

    I needed to delete comments in these sections to be able to turn designer mode off! Thank you for the workaround.