MS Word - Clean copy

Factual Questions
1

I’ve written a document in MS Word and now want to send a clean copy out for a review. I don’t want previous versions of the document to be seen by the recipient.

If I copy the entire document into a new MS Word blank, does that erase prior editing history? Or is there something else I need to do?

2

Document Inspector in Word lets you remove all hidden info

Remove hidden data and personal information by inspecting documents, presentations, or workbooks - Microsoft Support.

3

Depending on what you want the recipient to do with it, you could save it as a PDF and send them that. It wouldn’t be editable, of course.

4

The recipient insists on a Word document only, so that it can be edited.

Thanks for the Inspect function, @FinsToTheLeft . Was not aware of it, but that looks like it should do. Will try it when I’m back in the office.

5

I encountered the same situation years ago.

I have no idea how much formatting you have in your Word document, but mine was just text with paragraph breaks. I copied and pasted the text into a Notepad document and saved it as text document. Then I opened a new Word doc and copied and pasted the text from the Notepad document. Worked like a champ.

6

Select All, Copy, paste into a different word processor, save, close. Reopen, Select All, Copy, paste into Word.

Examine for formatting weirdnesses. Save. Send.

ETA: Essentially what Railer13 just said, but if you use a word processor instead of Notepad it preserves formatting (most of it at least).

7

I wonder if you just copy/pasted text directly into a new Word doc, would that work?

8

I don’t think you want to copy it into a completely new document. I think (but am not sure), It’s best to open a new document, type anything so you don’t have a blank document, then c/p from the original document. Word will then consider this a completely new document, though it will have whatever meta data is stored by default – perhaps identifying the author.

9

Thanks. That makes sense.

10

Go to the “Review” menu toolbar.

Accept all changes and stop tracking.

Save a new copy.

Send to your new reviewer.

11

That doesn’t allow you to keep tracking changes for yourself.

Make a copy first. Then make irreversible changes.