Can the Recipient See Tracked Changes in Your Word File?
Setting a Word document to show no markup does not take the tracked changes out of the file. We built two files, one with markup hidden and one without, and compared what was actually inside. Nothing had been removed. Here is what to check before you attach a .docx.
If you set a Word document to hide markup and then save it, the person who opens it next will see the markup again. We made two files — one with markup hidden, one without — and opened both in a separate copy of Word. They behaved identically. The revisions and comments were still there in both.
Tracked changes and comments exist because documents get edited by more than one person. Their presence is not the problem. The problem is narrower than that: not knowing they are still there when you press send.
What we tested on
- Microsoft Word 16.0 (build 16.0.20228, Microsoft 365) on Windows
- .docx format
- Checked on 6 August 2026
The steps below were performed through Word's automation interface rather than by clicking the ribbon. We did not verify how the buttons look or feel on screen. The button names quoted here come from Word itself, but treat the descriptions of the interface as secondhand.
We did not test Word for Mac, Word for the web, or the perpetual-licence versions (2021, 2019 and so on).
What we did
We created a document, added tracked changes and comments, then worked through the clean-up steps one at a time, saving a separate file at each stage. Afterwards we opened each file and counted what was left inside.
| File | Insertions | Deletions | Comments | Author name |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Untouched | 0 | 0 | 0 | present |
| 2. Changes and comments added | 1 | 6 | 3 | present |
| 3. Markup set to hidden | 1 | 6 | 3 | present |
| 4. All changes accepted | 0 | 0 | 3 | present |
| 5. All comments deleted | 0 | 0 | 0 | present |
| 6. Document Inspector run | 0 | 0 | 0 | empty |
Hiding is not removing
Compare rows 2 and 3. Hiding the markup changed none of the counts.
The file did not even shrink. It went from 19,515 to 19,534 bytes — 19 bytes larger, because the "don't display markup" preference itself got written into the file.
When we reopened that third file in a fresh copy of Word, the display had reverted to Simple Markup — exactly the state we saw when opening file 2.
So the display preference does get saved. It just does not carry over to the reader in the way you might assume. That gap is what makes this easy to get wrong: on your own screen, the document looks clean.
A deletion keeps the deleted text
The edits in file 2 were three: some text added, some text removed, one table row deleted.
What the file carried was one insertion mark and six deletion marks — seven traces for three edits. And a deletion mark contains the text that was deleted. The words are still in the file, waiting to be displayed.
The number of edits you remember making is not the number of traces left behind.
Accepting changes leaves the comments
Look at row 4. Accepting all changes took the insertions and deletions to zero. The three comments stayed.
Clearing revisions and clearing comments are two separate operations. Doing the first one and stopping there leaves the second untouched.
Resolving a comment did not remove it either. A resolved comment gets marked as resolved and stays in the file — which is worth knowing, because resolving is the action that makes a comment disappear from view.
One more counting detail: a reply is stored as its own comment. Two comments plus one reply came to three.
Names go deeper than the properties panel
The author and last-modified-by names survived all the way to row 5. Only the Document Inspector in row 6 cleared them.
There was one result we did not expect. We changed the user name in Word before starting, and the file still recorded the previous name. Word reported the new name in its own settings, yet the old one appeared as the author, as the person who made each revision, and as the comment author.
When you are signed in to Microsoft 365, the account name appears to take priority. We could not confirm which combination of settings produces this, so we are not going to claim a cause. The finding we can state is narrow: changing the user name in Word does not necessarily change the name written into the file.
We also found that adding even one comment creates a separate record identifying the commenter inside the file. Deleting all the comments removed that record too.
When leaving them in is the right call
None of this means you should strip every document.
- A draft still circulating internally. Remove the history and reviewers lose the thread of who changed what
- A contract or spec you are editing jointly. The other side often needs to see what moved
- Your own working draft
Tracked changes are a collaboration feature. The calculation only changes when the document leaves the building as a finished thing.
What to check before you send
Three things: revisions, comments, and document properties.
- Open the Review tab
- Use Display for Review to show all markup. This only changes what you can see — it does not alter the file
- Check Show Markup for which categories are currently displayed
- If you decide to clear them: Accept → Accept All Changes, and separately Delete All Comments in Document
- Finally, File → Info → Check for Issues → Inspect Document. In our test this was the only step that emptied the author and last-modified-by fields
One caveat worth carrying away. In our test, Track Changes was still switched on after every clean-up step had been run. Open that file again, edit one word, and the history starts accumulating from scratch. Cleaning a document once does not settle the matter.
What this does not cover
- What the recipient sees also depends on their own settings. We tested opening the file in a separate copy of Word on the same machine
- Word for Mac, Word for the web, and perpetual-licence versions were not tested
- We did not test how exporting to PDF handles revisions and comments
- We did not test whether the Document Inspector's removals can be undone
Reopening the file every time does not stick
Everything above works in Word alone. No extra tooling required.
In practice, though, each check means reopening the document and switching the display just to look. When you are moving quickly through email, that detour is the first thing to go. It seemed more realistic to us to assume it will be skipped.
So we built a browser extension that notices when an attached file still carries tracked changes or comments, and says so.
It only reports. It does not delete or rewrite anything. Whether to clear the history is a decision to make in Word, using the steps above. It does not send your files anywhere either.
The same extension reads Excel files too. Whether a hidden sheet is still within reach of the person you send it to is something we measured separately.
The point of a tool like this is not to make a file safe. It is to make the leftover information visible again, so the decision to send stays with the person sending.