Track Changes in Word 2003

[Carol Deavy]

Documents created using Word 2000 and opened in Word 2003 are showing all the
changes.

How do we, as an organization, modify all Word 2000 documents so that people
who have Word 2003 do not see the changes? This is a huge privacy and
security issue!

 

[garfield-n-odie]

If there are no tracked changes or comments in your document,
then Final view would look the same as Final Showing Markup view.
Word 2002 and 2003 open in Final Showing Markup view to let you
know that your document contains tracked changes and/or comments,
and to save you possible grief from inadvertently sending the
document out that way.

Word 2000 users have always been able to view the tracked changes
if they so desired by clicking on View | Track Changes. What
you, as an organization, perceive to be a huge privacy and
security issue with Word 2003 has always been an issue even with
Word 2000. You, as an organization, need to learn to accept all
tracked changes and delete all comments from your documents.

If you really want bury your head in the sand and turn this
feature off in Word 2003, you can do so by clicking on Tools |
Options | Security | uncheck the "Make hidden markup visible when
opening or saving" box | OK.

 

[Carol Deavy]

You neglected to answer the question: How do we modify all Word 2000
documents at this point? Is there a tool? My colleague is looking into the
RDHTOOL but I read the information on this tool to be used for Word 2003
documents and not 2000 documents. Am I right?

 

[garfield-n-odie]

Actually, you neglected to read my answer to the question: Accept
all tracked changes and delete all comments. See
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=237361 "How to minimize
metadata in Microsoft Word 2000 documents". Tracked changes are
discussed in "How to Remove Revision Marks". Comments are
discussed in "How to Remove Comments in Documents". Manually,
one document at a time, is the traditional way. It may be
possible to create a VBA macro in Word that opens each Word
document in a given folder, accepts all tracked changes and
deletes all comments, and saves and closes the Word document.

As far as I know, the Remove Hidden Data add-in only works on
Word documents created with Word 2002 and 2003.

 

[Carol Deavy]

So if I read between the lines, there is no tool to modify all previously
created word 2000 documents saved without accepting all tracked changes and
deleting all comments.

KB article is great, and thank you for your input on the Remove Hidden Data
Add-in.