Can people see the changes made in word document?

I drafted something in a Word document and then made some changes before emailing it. Can the person receiving the document see or roll back to previous edits? If they can, how can I prevent that?

To prevent them from changing the document, you can send it as something other than a word doc, typically a pdf. Or, you can get rid of tracked changes, save it, and send it with a checksum -- they can edit the file, but then it won't match the checksum.

Note: in really old versions of Word (think Word 97-2003) they could. This was a real security problem.

@user253751 sounds cool, could you make that an answer with a bit more information? Perhaps not entirely useful to the OP, but certainly good for completeness.

@SaaruLindestøkke Long story short, .doc files have a tiny filesystem inside them and appending to it was noticeability faster on old hardware than rewriting, so changes were only appended most of the time to improve user experience. Only every few saves Word actually rewritten entire file. I think they disabled it in 2003 and a patch was released for 2000.

6 Answers 6

It's not as straightforward as the initial revision of the answer of Guest suggests.

Can others see my edits?

I think there are a couple cases with Word files (tl;dr conclusion in parenthesis):

1. Track changes disabled (✔: nobody can see your edit history)
2. Track changes enabled (❗ people might see your edit history)
3. Hosted online in Google Docs, OneDrive, Sharepoint, the cloud (❗ people might see your edit history)

Track changes disabled

Track changes allows you to make changes, while the old text remains available. You can check in the Review panel if Track Changes is on or off (here it's off):

In this case you can safely edit the document, save it, and send it as an attachment without anyone finding out what you've changed.

Track changes enabled

If track changes is enabled, people can see what you've changed. Here it's enabled:

In case it's enabled and my original text looks like this:

I can make changes, and then it looks like this if I enable All Markup in the tracking settings:

However, if I set it to No Markup it looks as if the old text is not there anymore:

Yet it is! If you would send a Word document by e-mail while you've made changes with Track Changes enabled, someone could easily find what changes you've made.

And you wouldn't be the first to fall for it. Here's a list of large serious organizations that made the same mistake, disclosing draft versions of their document unintentionally.

Hosted online in Google Docs, OneDrive, Sharepoint, the cloud ☁

There's no uniform answer for all the different cloud providers, but often they keep a history of your file for 30-90 days. If you send your document as a link to the document hosted online instead as an attachment it could very well be that the receiver can see the full history.

How do I make sure others cannot see my changes?

Several options, but it depends on what your requirements are. Below a few suggestions.

• If formatting is of no concern you can copy-paste the text into a plain text file, the e-mail itself or a new document
• If track changes was on, accept all changes, turn off track changes and save your file.
• You can also print to PDF, after you accepted all changes (or selected No Markup in the tracking menu)

Normally at default track changes is disabled so anyone who dont want to save tracks of edit would not turn that feature at all so I did not mention that straightforward solution before

In my experience normally and at default can mean different things at different computers, so that's why I think your first answer revision was not sufficient. Also, as the link to examples where track changes went wrong in the public shows, it's not that straightforward.

Now since I have improved my answer can you remove the link superuser.com/revisions/1562134/1 in your answer it dont looks good you could simply say that without pointing link

I'm not sure I understand what your concern is. Feel free to propose an edit to my answer (removing any lines you feel are offending) and let the community approve/reject it. Also on the default thing: here's a question with 97k views that asks how to stop track changes turning on automatically.

One thing that I don't think anyone's mentioned yet is the Inspect Document tool. This lets you check for (and then optionally remove) things like unresolved tracked changes, along with various other types of content you might not want to share with other users.

(This means you don't have to rely on going through the tracked changes choosing accept/reject, and just hope you don't miss any - the Document Inspector can tell you for certain.)

Go to File -> Info to see this tool:

If you click on Check for Issues -> Inspect Document, you can choose to check the document for various types of content. Once the Document Inspector has run it'll give you the option to remove anything it finds:

Any tracked changes will be in that top category. I think clicking to remove revision marks, will 'solidify' the current version of the document and remove the "Track changes" marks showing previous versions. So if you've run the Document Inspector and it does find this stuff, you may want to close and go back to manually resolve the revisions (accept/reject) to make sure you end up with the version you want.

The Protect Document tool lets you restrict what people can do with the document (like make it read-only), though I'm not sure if it could prevent them from just saving a copy to then edit. There's also an option to add a digital signature, which I think would let you verify later whether it had been changed, but I'm afraid I've never tried that feature.