Microsoft Track Changes — Word for Mac (2011) Step 1: Open your Microsoft Word document, and locate the Review tab. Step 2: Locate the Track Changes icon in the Tracking panel; be sure that the Track Changes is switched off.

‎My previous tutorial “” shows how to change user names for comments and edits created with. However, Word doesn’t have a straightforward way to change user names connected to existing comments and edits, so that tutorial only works for new comments and edits. As an alternative, today’s tutorial demonstrates how to replace user names connected to all Track Changes (existing and future) with the default label Author. This solution obviously isn’t ideal for those of us who would like to change our user name for existing comments and edits to something other than Author, but it is useful when anonymity is important.

This tutorial is also available as a YouTube video, which you can watch on my or in the video player at the bottom of this page. The images below are from Word 2016; however, the steps are the same for Word 2019 and similar for Word 2013.

How to Remove User Names from Existing Track Changes Caution: This process is not reversible and applies to all users associated with the document, even those who haven’t used Track Changes. It also permanently removes authorship and “Last Modified By” data. Therefore, you should complete this process on a secondary copy of your document rather than on the original. Open a secondary copy of the original document saved under a different file name.

(Please see the Caution statement above.) 2. Select the File tab. Select the Check for Issues button in the Backstage view. Select Inspect Document in the drop-down menu. Save your document by selecting Yes in the question dialog box. (This dialog box may not appear if you recently saved your changes.) 6.

Deselect all the options in the Document Inspector dialog box except Document Properties and Personal Information. Select the Inspect button. Select the Remove All button next to Document Properties and Personal Information. Verify the inspection results.

Select the Close button to close the Document Inspector dialog box. Save, close, and reopen the document. Verify that all user names have been changed to Author in the Track Changes balloons. This tutorial was requested by several of my blog readers. (Thank you, readers!) Please let me know in the comment section below if you have a Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat, or writing topic that you would like me to address in a future post. Hi Erin, Were I to wipe all these details using this method and pass the file after locking it to someone else, will their changes also reflect as ‘Author’? What I want to know is, will all future changes made to the document also be attributed to the same author?

Here’s what I need to do exactly: a bunch of us have worked on some files–and we don’t want the client to know who these people are, or when they worked on the files. But we do need the client to see the changes made to the original document. We also need to see the author’s feedback on these files. For this, the changes we made need to appear as distinct from those made by the author. In this case, what approach would work best? Thanks in advance for your help!

Thank you for reading my blog! Word can act a little strangely when dealing with the Document Inspector so I can’t guarantee this solution will work (so as always, do a test run on a copy of you file, not the original!), but you may want to try this: (1) After your group has completed all the edits as “Author,” save the document and then create a backup copy for safety. (2) Open the copy and return to the Backstage view.

(3) Click the “Allow this information to be saved to your file” link that appears under the Inspect Document heading. How to make a video for youtube on a mac. (4) Save the document again. In theory, when you send this version of the document to your client, Word should once again record reviewer names and editing times for all new comments and edits.