We’re not going to get into US domestic politics but it was amusing to see, yet again, someone caught publicly by the Track Changes feature in Word.
This time it was a submission to a US Senate hearing where the Word document showed the wording before and after it had been checked by someone at the White House. No-one seems surprised by the political involvement in a political process – it’s just that it was so obvious.
Mr Derrick Max said:
‘The real scandal here is that after 15 years of using Microsoft Word, I don’t know how to turn off “track changes”.’
Derrick, there’s more to it than just turning off Track Changes. You can turn the feature off but any changes made while tracking was on are still stored in the document.
If you want to ‘clean’ a document before sending it out then grab the Remove Hidden Data tool from Microsoft (available for Office 2003 and Office XP) . It will add a ‘Remove Hidden Data’ option to the File menu.
