If you have enabled the "Allow fast saves" feature, earlier versions of your document, that you thought had been deleted, may still be readable.
If the document was edited with "Track Changes" enabled, a name is associated with each change. You can get rid of all the personal information with a few simple settings.
Choose Options from the Tools menu, click on the Save tab, and uncheck the box labeled "Allow fast saves". Now click on the Security tab and check the box titled "Remove personal information from this file on save".
In Word 2003 the check box's title is: "Remove personal information from file properties on save". When you save the file, the Author, Manager, Company, and Last saved by fields are cleared. Names in comments or edits are changed to simply Author. Any routing slip or e-mail header information is also removed. If the document contains tracked changes, you may want to accept them all before saving.
The Allow fast saves option is global. The Remove personal information option is specific to the current file and is present only in Word 2002 and later. If you want that option to be the default, click on the File Locations tab in the Tools> Options dialog and note the folder containing user templates. In that folder, open the file Normal.dot. Check the Remove personal information box as noted above, then save and close the file. All new files created from this point on will have that feature enabled by default.
Microsoft downloads: Office 2003/XP Add-in: Remove Hidden Data With this add-in you can permanently remove hidden data and collaboration data, such as change tracking and comments, from Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint files.
