Along with Windows 11/10, you might have a great experience of using Office, because this Office edition comes with lots of new features and improvements. The Pick Up Where You Left Off feature lets you start working at just that point, where you may have stopped working the earlier day, maybe. This is because Word keeps track of the last three locations where you typed or edited text. In some earlier versions of Word, you had to press Shift+F5 to use the Go Back feature. In-Office, you will get a notification on the left side asking if you want to Pick up where you left off.
When you close a document, Word automatically bookmarks your most recent position in the document. If you take a break from reading, you can pick up where you left off when you reopen your document. If you are signed in to Office, Resume Reading works even if you reopen the document from a different computer or device.
If you feel this feature is useless for you, you may want to disable it. In this article, we’ll show you how to disable this feature completely, so that it won’t irritate you anymore. Here is how:
Disable Pick Up Where You Left Off in Word
1. Press Windows Key + R combination, type put Regedt32.exe in Run dialog box and hit Enter to open the Registry Editor.
2. Navigate to the following location:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Word\Reading Locations
3. Here, the Reading Locations key is the culprit and is responsible for raising the tip on every start-up of Office components. If you delete this key, it will help you disable the tip immediately. But as soon as you reboot the machine, the system will write the key again, and the tip will start popping up. So we need to make this key read-only for everyone so that it can’t be rewritten by the system. To make this key read-only, right-click over it and pick Permissions.
4. Click on Advanced in the above-shown window. Now uncheck the option “Replace all child object permission entries with inheritable permission entries from this object”.
5. Click Apply followed by OK, again do the same for Permissions window. You may close the Registry Editor now, reboot to see results.
I hope you find the article useful!
Thanks for the great and detailed post Kapil! I think that in a more recent version of Word, the “Replace all child object permission entries with inheritable permission entries from this object” box is unchecked by default, and you have to check “deny” Full Control to SYSTEM in the Permissions window before it will work. Cheers!
^^ Thanks Bill for writing us back, glad you find it useful. :)
Thank you. You are the only one I’ve found so far who gave me detailed instructions on how to do this. Everyone else gave me programmer gobbledy-gook. I’m not an engineer so I needed the step by step. I absolutely despise and detest this feature in Word and was desperate to turn it off. I wish I could go back to Word 2010. These “improvements” were no improvement for me. Thank you again. This is so great. :)
Why oh why do Msoft hide this in the Registry?
Maybe it’s because the developers at the Roaches Development Center are complete and absolute idiots.
Hello, I deleted the documents in the reading locations folder of the registry. As Bill said, the “replace all child object…” box was unchecked for me. Next, I clicked “Deny” to the “SYSTEM” user. I’m still getting the “welcome back” message. I also tried “disable inheritance”, but that didn’t work. I also clicked “deny” for all the groups/user names, but I’m still getting the message in word. Anyone have some suggestions? Thank you
this does not work. already unchecked.
Sigh, didn’t work for me either, even hitting Deny for System and then rebooting. Thanks for clear instructions, though. Welcome Back is so annoying! This plus the Blue Screen of Death and other things. Why oh why did I finally give in to the prompts to upgrade to W10?
But I’m using a Mac- is there no way I can disable this feature? Otherwise I’ll stop using the damn programme.
I have the same problem and got the same results as the last three replies. Even after changing the permissions for SYSTEM and re-booting, the Welcome Back popup still appears when opening an existing document in Word.
To me, it works just by deleting the subkey “Position” under every ‘Document …’ from the Registry editor…wordReading Location. The problem is SOLVED! Thanks a lot!
When I apply (in Office 2016)
Replace all child object permission entries with inheritable permission entries from this object
it asks for confirmation. When I click Yes, the check mark disappears, so I can’t make the change. Any suggestions very welcome. Thank you.