Hi Ofisteqi,

If you never turn on Tracked Changes in the Tools menu for a particular
document, the changes won't be tracked in that document. That's all there is
to that.

If you do turn on Tracked Changes, you must have a purpose in doing so --
you want someone else (or yourself later on) to see what was changed. Or you
received the document from someone else who intended that. The feature is
primarily for sharing and reviewing information in a workgroup.

Once you do track changes, they stay in the document until you remove them.
The procedure given in that article isn't complicated. It boils down to
this: "If you want to send a document that has tracked changes, and you
don't want the recipient to see them, then use the Accept All button on the
Reviewing toolbar." As the article is written, it takes into account the
possibilities that (a) the toolbar might not be visible when you start, (b)
some of the options might have been turned off, and (c) you might want to
remove some changes and not others.

If you're worried about stuff being hidden in Word documents, get the
hidden-data-remover add-in from http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=834427.

This stuff isn't rocket science. For someone who alludes to being an "Office
Techie" it shouldn't even be worth commenting about.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org

Ofisteqi wrote:
Is there a way to turn off Tracked Changes without going through the
hoops found in this article?
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/as...983881033.aspx
From what I've read about Tracked Changes, it appears that there is
no way to 'shut off' this information from being hidden in the
document. Of course, there are add-in for converting to .pdf etc, but
why doesn't Word offer a setting (one setting and not confusing
multiple settings stated in this article) to turn this 'feature' off.

Can anyone explain what the purpose is of having changes tracked from
Microsoft's viewpoint?

With all of the press lately about legal issues and document
retention and storage, there should be a way to shut this down
without attending a training session.

Thanks for your feedback.