Word crashes with documents with "track changes" on

I was struggling to find the settings Balázs Bábos was referring to in his answer. So, I'd like to share that screenshot with instuctions:

While writing the answer I just realized that the question is for the apple version of Word. However, the same problem occurs on my PC and this fix helped.

The problem is not with the track changes and comments but how Word tries to display them: in a Balloon...

Luckily there is a simple solution:

Word -> Preferences -> Track Changes -> "Use balloons to display changes" 

remove the tickmark from here.

You can still see the changes inside text by checking the colors and use

Review tab -> Comments -> Previous, Next

to step through comments (the list will be opened at a left side sidebar). Convinient way although not so fancy, but at least: it works!

I downloaded the Microsoft Word 2011 for Mac 14.4.8 update. After installing the update, the problem is resolved.

Note: Backup your Outlook data using the export function.

I had the same problem and in my case I was able to get past it by disabling Balloons - "Use balloons to display changes" in the Track Changes preferences.

If you don't show the gallery on startup and you can't open Word without it first wanting to reload the crashing file, then you may need to first remove the folder:

~/Library/Saved Application State/com.microsoft.Word.savedState

Deleting the preferences and everything in Library/Application Support/Microsoft both in my account and globally did not bring any change.

I then re-installed Office, re-updated it and everything went back to normal.

try deleting the preference files....

I use track changes all the time on MS Word on my Mac and it normally works fine. Also you say this is reproducible behaviour on different files so it is clearly something to do with your specific installation. I suspect it might be due to a corrupt preferences file. Anyway it would be worth testing this by removing the word preference files - try both the

~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft... files

~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft files.

If you have more than one user account set up on your machine you could start off by seeing if the problem occurs on all user accounts.