Can't disable live preview in style task pane

I'm with Stefan for using the Styles dialog and avoiding the awkward style group. In fact, I customized my ribbon to eliminate it to make room for more useful tools to help me deal with book pagination.

You can also use options of the Styles dialog to manage what styles are presented.

• The "Options..." button will let you manage which styles to show (all, in use, in current document, and the mysterious "recommended"*); and how the style list is sorted (which includes another "recommended").
• You can also turn on settings to show where direct formatting has been added (very useful for finding anomalies when formatting a book).
• The vague "Hide built-in name when alternate name exists" setting is a sleeper, and adds to the big list of reasons to use built-in names rather than go wild creating custom styles. With this turned on, a built-in style with a pseudonym added after a semicolon can be displayed by the pseudonym name in the list. (i.e. Prefer "Subheading" to the built-in "Heading 3"? Rename the Heading 3 style to "Heading 3;Subheading" and turn on this setting to have the style displayed as "Subheading"! You still get the benefits of the built-in headings for navigation and cross-referencing.

The "Manage Styles" button in the Styles dialog opens the kimono for the mysterious "recommended" references — and lets you further tame styles to better fit your needs. It isn't trivial, so best to follow the Help and do some investigating before making major changes. Options let you manage how styles are hidden (or not); sort orders; set availability of styles in documents protected for formatting changes; and set certain defaults.

It should be added that the options for screen tips / tool tips do not appear to affect the pop-up descriptions when you rest the mouse pointer on the style names in the Styles pane.

Just to correct a misimpression: The "Enable live preview" option does not control whether a style's definition popup appears when you hover over its name in the Styles pane. It does control whether the selected text in the document shows what that text would look like if the style is applied, when you hover over the style's button in the Style gallery on the Home ribbon.

Another possible confusion exists with the "Show Preview" check box at the bottom of the Styles pane. That controls only whether the names of the styles in the pane are shown with the styles' properties. When it's cleared, all the names appear in left-aligned Segou UI font, but the definition popups still appear on hovering.

Stefan's suggestion of using the Apply Styles dialog instead of the Styles pane is an excellent alternative with no popups. Another one is to add the Style dropdown to the Quick Access Toolbar. The Apply Styles dialog is better because it includes the Reapply and Modify buttons.

As far as I know, you can't prevent the pop-up descriptions from showing when you rest the mouse pointer on the style names in the Styles pane.

You can send feedback to Microsoft via File > Feedback > Send a Frown.

As a workaround, see if you can use the Apply Styles pane (Ctrl+Shift+S) instead. You can type in a name in the "Style Name" box (by default, Word will AutoComplete what you type). Or you can click the drop down and scroll through style names.