Hide who makes changes in track changes (Word 2000)

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Is there a way to use track changes and NOT have it record who made the changes and when?

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In Word 2002 and 2003, you can turn on an option to change the author name to “unknown” when the document is saved. This was not possible in Word 2000. Instead, the workaround was to use Tools>Options…, User Information tab, and change the name here. I’m pretty sure this is the way that Word identifies the “author” of tracked changes. As you may know, Word stores other user-related information in the “metadata” of Word documents, so it’s possible that even if individual changes all are marked as “Anonymous” (or whatever), your username might appear in the document when viewed in a text editor or opened using the “Recovered Text from Any File (*.*)” file format filter.

If you don’t need the changes to be “acceptable” or “rejectable,” you can convert them to hardcoded direct formatting. For example, see post 173394. That’s some old code I can’t completely vouch for, but you get the general idea.

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Thanks–if we change to “unknown” via Tool, Option, will that change tracked changes made by someone else? We received a document with track changes in it. We want to suggest more changes but not have the final recipeint know who suggested which change. Someone else has teh document on their computer so I can’t test it myself. Thanks

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Changes to User Information apply to new changes only. In your case, it seems the best bet would be to run it through Word 2002 or 2003 with the “Remove personal information” option turned on.

Alternately, you could try using Word’s compare feature. Frankly, it has never been very reliable, and 2000 seemed to have more problems than 97 in our office. But if you want to give it a shot…

1. Change your user name to unknown
2. Reject all changes. Save As something like TestOriginal.doc (do not overwrite your original!)
3. Undo until you get your changes back and then Accept all changes. Save As something like TestFinal.doc (do not overwrite TestOriginal.doc!)
4. Use the Compare feature (somewhere on the Tools menu) to compare the open TestFinal.doc against the saved TestOriginal.doc

If all the stars and planets are aligned just right, you should now have a new unsaved document which duplicates all of the original changes but with the current date/time and with the author unknown. More likely, a lot of the changes aren’t quite the way they were before and some manual tweaking or clean-up will be required. Worst case scenario, the compare gave up half way through and just deleted all the original text and inserted all the final text. This is why there is a market for third party comparison tools.

Hope this helps.

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See post 441,718 for info on how to modify the identity of the reviewer using RTF.

HTH,

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