Word – Can people see the changes made in word document

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):

  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):

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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: enter image description here

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

enter image description here

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

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

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)
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