How to Completely Disable ‘Smart Tags’ (Action Buttons) in Microsoft Word

In older versions of Microsoft Word (and persisting in various forms through modern Office 365 as Action Buttons or Action Tags), “Smart Tags” are designed to recognize specific types of data as you type—such as dates, names, telephone numbers, and addresses. When recognized, Word underlines the text with a faint, dotted purple line and provides a small pop-up button offering quick actions (like “Add to Contacts” or “Schedule Meeting”). While intended to save time, these unpredictable pop-ups can interfere with document formatting, clutter the screen, and create privacy concerns when sharing documents that contain automatically linked meta-data.

This guide explains how to completely disable Smart Tags (and their modern “Action” equivalents) in Microsoft Word to ensure your text remains purely text.

Disable Smart Tags via AutoCorrect Options

The control center for all automatic data recognition and tagging features is located deep within Word’s advanced proofing settings.

1. Open Microsoft Word and create a new blank document.
2. Click the File tab located in the top-left corner of the Ribbon interface.
3. Select Options at the bottom of the left-hand navigation pane to open the Word Options dialogue box.
4. In the left-hand sidebar, click on Proofing.
5. Near the top of the Proofing pane, click the button labelled AutoCorrect Options….
6. When the AutoCorrect window opens, navigate to the Actions tab (in older versions of Word, this tab is explicitly named Smart Tags).
7. Uncheck the master box labelled Enable additional actions in the right-click menu (or Label text with smart tags in older versions).
8. Click OK to close the AutoCorrect window, then click OK again to close the Word Options window.

Once disabled, Word will immediately cease scanning your document for recognizable data patterns. Any existing purple dotted lines in your current document will disappear, and no further action buttons will pop up when you type names or addresses.

Removing Embedded Smart Tags from an Existing Document

If you receive a document from a colleague who had Smart Tags enabled, the embedded meta-data might still travel with the file. To completely strip an existing document of all smart tagging:

1. Open the document containing the unwanted tags.
2. Press Ctrl + A to highlight the entire document.
3. Open the AutoCorrect Options window again using the steps outlined above.
4. On the Actions (or Smart Tags) tab, click the button labelled Remove Smart Tags (this button only appears if tags are present in the active selection).
5. Click OK.

This action purges the underlying XML data linking the text to external applications, ensuring the document is entirely clean before saving or converting it to a PDF.