Word crashes or freezes when accepting tracked changes, opening the Reviewing Pane, or opening a heavily-revised document

What's actually wrong

Documents that live for months with Track Changes on accumulate huge, fragile revision structures, and this is one of the best-documented ways a Word file corrupts — the classic symptom is a crash the moment you Accept All, scroll a heavily-marked section, or open the Reviewing Pane. Your text and formatting are almost always fully recoverable; what often cannot be saved is the revision markup itself, so plan on ending up with a clean document rather than one with its full change history.

Free fixes — try these first

1. Reduce the load, then accept in batches: close the Reviewing Pane, and on the Review tab set Show Markup → Balloons → Show only comments and formatting in balloons. Then accept or reject changes a few pages at a time, saving under a new file name as you go.
2. Roll back a version: if the file lives on OneDrive/SharePoint, right-click it → Version history, and restore the last version that opened cleanly.
3. The "everything but the last paragraph mark" transplant: open the document (Safe Mode winword /safe if needed), press Ctrl+A, then Shift+Left Arrow once to deselect the final paragraph mark, copy, paste into a new blank document, and save. Document-level corruption hides in that final ¶, and this leaves it behind.
4. Accept the changes somewhere sturdier: open a copy in LibreOffice Writer, use Edit → Track Changes → Accept All there, save as .docx, and reopen in Word.
5. Flatten via a different format: Save As Web Page (.htm) or .rtf, close, reopen that file and save back to .docx — this rebuilds the document structure and discards the corrupt revision plumbing (you will lose remaining tracked-change markup, and Web Page format also drops headers/footers).

If the free fixes fail

If the document crashes Word before you can select anything, or every rescue copy re-corrupts on save, the damage is in the revision XML itself — our analyzer strips the broken revision structures directly from the file and shows a percent-recovered preview first, being explicit that the tracked-changes history itself usually can't be saved.