Thanks, Paul.

I found this same question posed on a PC-based Word forum, and a respondent offered the following instructions for addressing this issue in Word 2007 (PC) http://bit.ly/mpkGUM

On the Office button menu, go to Prepare > Inspect Document. After inspecting the document, when the results panel shows up, click the button to remove all "Document Properties and Personal Information". Then save the document. The dates and times will be removed from all tracked changes, and the reviewer name will be changed to "Author".

This won't do if you're using custom document properties, because those would be removed at the same time.

After many hours of poking around, I discovered that you CAN suppress the date & time stamp from Track Changes--here's how to do it (in Word for Mac 2011, at any rate):



Go to "Word > Preferences > Personal Settings > Security > Privacy Options" and check "Remove personal information from this file on save" then save the document.

Voila! No more date or time stamp in Track Changes comments and edits in this document. This is positively Byzantine, but I'm glad the option exists!

Aden

Does this also work for Word 2016? I could not find the respective path to access that option.

I've been trying to do this now (i.e. July 2023) on Word 2016, and while I can remove w:date="[\d\W]*\w[\d\W]*\w" from both the document.xml and comments.xml files, it's not removing the date from the tracked documents. I've looked through the other xml files in the word folder, but can't find it hiding anywhere there. Any ideas where it might be logged?

Not having been able to get rid of the timestamps using the method described above, I've come up with an alternative approach:

1. Inspect document, and remove personal information.
2. Check 'Allow this information to be saved in your file.
3. Convert .docx to .zip, and open folder
4. Open 'comments.xml' and 'document.xml' with Notepad++
5. Replace w:author="Author" with w:author=[Your Name]
6. Copy the adjusted xml files back into the zipped folder
7. Re-convert .zip to .docx

This removes any timestamps, but still shows comments and changes under your own name. Of course, if several different people have made tracked changes or comments, it'll remove their names, and put all changes under your own name. But this could be gotten around by comparing files, as suggested in an earlier comment in the thread.