Eliminate time stamp in Track Changes

aac1218 · #16 06-15-2016, 08:23 AM

Another option to adjust timestamp in Word is to simply change your computer clock.
Though this does not eliminate the timestamp, at least you can set the time you want while preserving author name, date, and accept/reject action buttons on the comment balloon. (Ex. working in the wee hours of the morning and preferring not to disclose that.)

Georg · #17 01-12-2017, 12:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by wordguru

I found that if you're saving the Word document as docx, you can edit the XML directly and remove the timestamps this way. Follow the procedure below if you want to do this:

1. Rename the file to zip so it becomes a ZIP archive and you can easily open it using the appropriate tools
2. Open the renamed file, it will now open as a ZIP archive
3. Open the word folder in the ZIP archive
4. Open and edit the document.xml file in a good text editor. For example use Notepad++
5. Search using the following regular expression:
w:date="[\d\W]*\w[\d\W]*\w"
and replace with nothing. This regular expression will match all XML
timestamp attributes and remove them from the document.xml file.
6. Update the ZIP archive with the modified document.xml file
7. Rename the ZIP archive back to docx sothat it becomes a Word document again

My man, what a superb guru you truly are! Praise and worship upon you, o great one! (And a lot of thanks, too!)
It’s confounding why this is not a built-in feature in Word, but the workaround at least makes it possible to do what one wants! And, once mastered, it doesn’t take toooo long.

Tracking · #18 03-06-2017, 01:24 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Aden

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

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

mrsprings · #19 07-10-2023, 07:00 PM

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?

mrsprings · #20 07-10-2023, 09:02 PM

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.

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