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?
editingmicrosoft word
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?
Best Answer
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):
Track changes disabled
Track changes allows you to make changes, while the old text remains available. You can check in the
Review
panel ifTrack 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.
track changes
was on, accept all changes, turn offtrack changes
and save your file.No Markup
in the tracking menu)