An illustration of a typical result. No real file, name or location is used.
Before — what you would be sending
pricing-proposal.docxDOCX
Tracked changes14 insertions and 9 deletions still recorded
Named editorsa.whitfield, r.mehta, j.okafor
Total editing time6h 22m
After cleaning
pricing-proposal-clean.docxDOCX
Tracked changesremoved
Named editorsremoved
Total editing timeremoved
Insertions accepted, deletions removed. Your final text is exactly as you left it.
A .docx is a zip archive
Rename one to .zip and open it and you will find a folder of XML files. One of them, docProps/core.xml, holds the author, the last person to save it, the title and the revision count. Another, app.xml, holds the company name and the total number of minutes the document has been open for editing.
Total editing time is more revealing than it looks
A proposal that claims weeks of work and reports eleven minutes of editing time tells a story. So does a contract where the editing time is enormous, which suggests it was heavily negotiated internally before you saw it. Neither is something anyone intends to disclose.
Tracked changes are content, not metadata
Insertions and deletions are stored in the document body with the name of whoever made them and when. Deleted text is still there and still readable. Turning off the display of tracked changes hides them from view without removing them, which is how internal negotiating positions end up in the hands of the other side.
Comments too
Reviewer comments live in their own part of the archive. They survive being collapsed in the interface. Cleaning here removes the comment parts, accepts insertions and rejects deletions, which is the same result as accepting all changes in Word — only without needing Word.
In practice
Reading a .docx without Word
Copy the file, rename the copy to end in .zip, and open it. Inside is a folder structure you can read with any text editor. The file docProps/core.xml holds the author, the last person to save it, and the timestamps. docProps/app.xml holds the company and the total editing time. word/document.xml is the text itself, and searching it for w:del reveals deleted content. This is worth doing once on a document of your own, because seeing your own name sitting in plain XML changes how you think about sending these files.
Accepting changes is not the same as hiding them
Word offers two very different things that look similar. Setting the markup display to show the final version hides revisions from your screen and changes nothing in the file. Accepting all changes resolves them into ordinary text and removes the record. Only the second one is a fix. The distinction has produced real disclosures, because the document looks clean on the sender's screen either way.
Document Inspector, and its blind spot
Word's built-in Document Inspector, under File and Info, finds and removes hidden properties, comments and revision marks, and it works well. Its blind spot is that it is a manual step someone has to remember on every version of every document. In practice the failures are not caused by the tool missing something; they are caused by a final change made after the inspection, then saved and sent.
Common questions
Does Word save the author's name in the document?
Yes. It is written into the document properties from your Office account or username, and it stays until it is removed.
Can someone see what I deleted in a Word document?
If tracked changes were on, yes. Deleted text is retained in the file and can be displayed by anyone who opens it.
What is Document Inspector?
Word's built-in tool for finding and removing hidden properties and personal information. It works well, but only if you remember to run it every time.