Charles Victor Ganelin said:
Using Office 2004: I have a 7-page document that had been revised by a
lawyer, who made notations via Comments. I cleaned up the new version,
turned off Comments (so they couldnÕt be seen) and sent it to another
individual. She opened the document and the Comments appear (she works on a
PC). This is a document that needs to be sent out to approximately 150
others, but without Comments. How do I remove them permanently and retain
the changes that have been made to the document?
Many thanks for any help you can provide.
Try the help with something like "review comment" in the search box.
If there are lawyers involved or if any of your recipients are smarter
than the average bear, you should take special care to sanitise the
document before sending it off into the wide world.
You would be amazed how much can be learned with the aid of a simple
text editor from the garbage that Word leaves lying around in the file
you send.
On a copy. Accept all changes. Then follow the help for deleting
comments. Directions vary with all the silly toolbars. Me, I'd just
assign a shortcut to the command "DeleteAllCommentsInDoc"
But then I *hate* toolbars.
Then save the document as html. Quit and restart Word. Open the html
and save as a normal Word document. Check that one for rubbish with
emacs or vi or similar programmer's text editor. If you can't drive one
of those, Word might work if you trick it into 'recover text from any
document' (I did not test this) Look for revealing path names to your
files. Make sure there are no sign of the lawyers' comments or any of
the revisions you made.
Unless you want your recipients to edit the document, don't even send
that one. Print it to PDF and send that instead.
For practice, it might be interesting to see if you could learn
something about the lawyer's thought processes on the version they sent
you ;-) I have succeeded in negotiating quite good deals in the past
using that technique. The client's lawyers were prepared to accept much
less favourable terms than I was about to offer, and they inadvertently
let me know in the left over tracked changes rubbish at the end of the
draft contract. I was happy to oblige them. Another time, a consultant
went to great efforts to conceal who his client was. He hadn't got out
of the building before we had it from the pathname lying in the rubbish
at the end of the doc he left us. Yes Virginia, the name of the
directory on his computer where he worked for weeks obfuscating their
requirements spec was the name of his client, and it was in the rubbish
at the end of the Word document he gave us.
Word is an exceptionally poor medium for exchanging sensitive
information.
