Word – How to change the name of a reviewer in Word

It is possible to do this in the new XML-based .docx format used by Word 2007. A .docx file is actually a ZIP file containing the different components of the document, which you can gain access to by renaming the file from filename.docx to filename.zip.

To change the author of tracked changes, open the file word\document.xml in a text editor. The author of each insertion and deletion is specified by the w:author attribute of the corresponding <w:ins> or <w:del> element. Change it to whatever you want, save the file back to the ZIP archive, and rename the file back to filename.docx.

Comments work the same way, except that they're stored in the file word\comments.xml, in <w:comment> elements. You must change the values of both the w:author and w:initials attributes for each comment, or you may get unexpected results.

Understand that doing this is probably a bad idea. The spec suggests that changing the authors of revisions and comments shouldn't cause trouble with other parts of the document, but who knows whether that's true in all cases, and in any event it's pretty easy to make mistakes with these kinds of changes unless you're just doing simple global search/replace operations. If you still want to take the risk, be sure to create backups of everything first.