Hiding Smart Tags

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated September 13, 2025)
This tip applies to Word 2002 and 2003

If you routinely work with documents sent to you by other people, you may want to hide the display of Smart Tags—the wavy purple underlines that appear in the document. To turn them off, so they are not visible, you can follow these steps:

Choose Options from the Tools menu. Word displays the Options dialog box.
Make sure the View tab is displayed. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. The View tab of the Options dialog box.

Clear the Smart Tags check box.
Click OK.

These steps only hide the wavy purple underlines; it doesn't stop SmartTags from being saved with the document. You need to follow the steps outlined in the previous tip to stop them from being saved with the document.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (7833) applies to Microsoft Word 2002 and 2003.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen...

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