On Apr 16, 2025, at 2:47 PM, Charles Phillips <phillipstriples@...> wrote:
Now I want to send a version to two different colleagues but have them NOT able to see changes that I made to earlier versions.
I haven¡¯t heard a Macintosh user ask this question for about a decade!
Well over a decade ago, Word had a feature called ¡°Fast Saves¡± that when enabled, saving a file was much faster. But¡it made your document less secure. Fast saves were accomplished by appending recent additions to the end of the document you were working on (at a lower level than what you saw on the screen), instead of updating and saving the entire document.
If you sent someone a document created with Fast Saves enabled, they could throw the document into a text editor and see all of the deleted text from multiple edits.
Word hasn¡¯t had a Fast Save feature for a very long time. It is no longer necessary, because computers are way faster now.
But if you are concerned, you can throw your Word document in a text editor yourself and see what might be left over. Something like the free version of BBEdit should work. Usually any extraneous metadata will appear at the very beginning or at the very end of the file.
There is other ¡°metadata¡±¡¯ in a Word document. But metadata is not really a big problem with Word/Mac like it is with Word/Win.
Here is what you can do to make sure that there is no extraneous metadata in a documen that you will be sharing with others.
When you are done with a document in Word, and want to cleanse it before sending it off to someone, look under:
File menu --> Properties ¡ª> Summary
and delete any information that you see there that is sensitive. (if you do this in your Normal template and save it, from then on nothing will appear there.)
Now, do a "Save As" of the file and save it with a different name. Doing this will purge any extraneous data in the file.
I hope this helps.
Charles Phillips