Confidentiality as email attachment (Word 2002)

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We regularly e-mail Word documents (non-disclosure agreements, service agreements, contracts, etc.) to outside companies and attorneys. Sometimes we use existing agreements with the verbiage that we want and just change the pertinent information for the specific situation. These may also include price rates, other company names, or general confidential information. Is it possible for anyone we e-mail documents to to view those changes? If you know of a good resource to explain these concepts, please share. Thanks!

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The short answer is “Maybe.” Check out Post #158499 for an example of how hiding tracked changes does not protect you from other people viewing them and seeing things you never intended. For more information on “metadata,” you can search that term here on the Word board.

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We’re a law firm and we have been preaching that users should not be using the Track Changes option, since it can allow others to see changes you’ve made if not properly handled. Because we’re a law firm, we use CompareRite as our “red-line” option instead of Track Changes. Additionally, we try to tell users not to re-use the same document, as there is metadata stored with the original that can be viewed when the document is transmitted electronically. (You’ll note the fact that we TRY to tell them . . . doesn’t do much good!) In the event that they do copy from another document, we preach the use of our “Metadata” macro, that helps to clean up some of the background information – like who originally created the document, etc., but it’s not as complete at the metadata cleanup program offered by Payne Consulting.

If you want to see what the metadata fuss is about, open a document that’s been used frequently with the “Recover text from any file (*.*)” option in the “Files of type:” section of the Open window. Particularly at the end, you’ll see all sorts of information that you didn’t know was there. By the way, when you open another document, be sure you change the “Files of type:” option back to your usual (All Word documents, or whatever) before you open it, because it doesn’t change back on its own.

Hope some of this helps.

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