TOOLS: Word documents are giving away your secrets and deletions

[shalanna]

Do you e-mail Word document files sometimes to your critique partners, bosses, and editors or agents? If you do, I'm sure you remember to remove all hidden text before you mail. Or do you?

(What's hidden text, you ask? Well, ages ago when I worked at E-Systems and got on a project using Macs for documentation and desktop tasks, my boss John and I started using "hidden text" to hide our alternative word choices and notes to ourselves in documents that we exchanged. I'd send him my drafts for approval and additions, while he would send me his stuff so I could check the phrasing and "spiff it up" because I was "the one who can write" in the group--and I also checked content, since I was the one who was down in the trenches using the documents, not just the boss watching from above. We would turn on the display of hidden text to read all the comments we had made in a document--this was waaay before "track changes," around 1987 or so!--and the two of us eventually would put snarky comments and thoughts and requirements that we were supposed to fulfill with the document . . . all in hidden text. Which was fine, because at that time the Mac version of Word came with "don't show hidden text" as a default, so the two of us had our secrets. But we got into a fix doing that eventually, because one of the Air Force fellows got hold of one of John's versions or my versions of a test procedure and saw all the comments, and it was kind of difficult explaining all our "thoughts." Word to the wise.)

I still use hidden text sometimes to keep interesting alternative phrasings or lines that I have decided I probably don't need, but would like to hang on to. You don't have to worry about printing that stuff, because unless you click to print hidden text and have hidden text turned on to show all the time on the screen, it'll be hidden, just as it says.

I *usually* remember to search-and-replace all hidden text before I consider a draft final. If I don't, it can be confusing for those who get my attached documents, because so many users of Word have no idea what hidden text is, and they have "show all" turned on as an option. This means that your text formatted as "Hidden" will show up as dot-underlined text. That confuses the heck out of people. They think you meant to write, "She picked up lifted her purse backpack out of the pool hot tub spa." They get all upset. (When in actuality your final version was, "She lifted her backpack out of the hot tub." The other words were in Hidden Text.)

Hidden text can be a great way to keep track of modifications that you may want to change back later or of alternative phrasings, but you have to remember to yank it before sending the file around, just in case. Even when I have told people to turn off the display in order to see my final word choices, they often don't know what I'm talking about.

Also, if you have hidden anything you don't want them to see . . . aarghh!

You can search in the search-and-replace dialog box for "formatting"/"font"/"hidden" and yank the hidden text. Or you can use a utility to do it: a free Microsoft tool removes hidden data from Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The Remove Hidden Data add-in tool (snipurl.com/3osw) will delete hidden text and comments from individual files or a batch of files at once. I have not personally used this tool, so enter at your own risk.

This issue came to mind this morning after I received a link to an article about various things that Word stores in a document file. I knew about this, but didn't really think about someone else caring to exploit it.

Word documents have fields in their headers containing meta-info regarding the name of the original author who created a document, who has edited it, document titles, keywords, print and save dates, and names of people who have reviewed and saved a document, as well as the name of the person the software is registered to and sometimes the name of the network server or hard drive on which the document is saved. "Track changes" version control and "comments" (saved by various users), among other features, are possible because of this.

Radio/web personality Kim Kommando (yeah, I know, corny appellation) recommends that you turn off "Fast Save." Makes sense, because all the deleted text and so forth goes down to the "bottom" of the document, before the operating system's EOF mark but after the mark that says "this is the end of the document." To turn it off: Tools/Options. Click the Save tab. Clear the "Allow fast saves" check box and click OK. Now you'll find that saves take longer. So you don't want to do this until you have a final draft that others may see (IMHO). I save a document after every few modifications or additions, which doesn't take as long with Fast Save (and now that hard drives are so much faster than they used to be!) I learned to do that using early versions of Word on that Mac. (We used to have the occasional power failure during document editing, too. If you had saved recently, you weren't as screwed.)

I still use Word 97, where you don't get this choice, but if you have Word 2002 or 2003, you have privacy tools. In Word 2003, according to Kim, go to Tools/Options and click the Security tab. Under Privacy options, select "Remove personal information from file properties on save" and click OK. In Word 2000, under Tools/Options, click the User Information tab and clear the information in Name, Initials and Mailing Address. Of course, if you do that, you're defeating a Word feature. But you may want to do it. (You could do that in 97, I suppose.)

You can also turn off "Track Changes." It's under the Tools menu. HOWEVER, I think this is a useful option. I typically re-save my documents after major revisions or edits under another file name ("CAMILLE v 3a.doc"), but that means I have a lot of big files in my "previous versions" folders. I think it's worth it, because occasionally Word documents will become corrupt, and your intellectual property goes "phfft." You then have to search backup CDs and hope you did one recently. If you have those saved files, and you back them up to CD often, you're safer. So I don't really use "Track Changes," I suppose.

(When Track Changes is enabled, TRK appears in the status bar at the bottom of the screen window. When Track Changes is disabled, TRK is dimmed. Thanks to Kim for this tidbit. She also adds that Track Changes must be disabled before ever writing the document. Otherwise, any changes made will not be removed.)

What you COULD do, if you were worried, is open the document, select all, copy, and then paste it into a new blank document. That'd get rid of a lot of stuff, including your headers, footers, and font/margins choices (unless you use Styles, which defeated me ages ago--I now just format by hand, because I have a fairly simple template.) You then have to re-do headers/footers and a few other things, but you got rid of all the deleted text and such when you did that copy.

I don't know whether you have any concerns, but if you want to increase your privacy and still be able to send around Word attachments, you might think about some of these issues.

Now that I have been asked a few times (by agents and editors) to submit Word documents as e-mail attachments, I can see where this might be important.

I have also heard that some agents now are requesting that you send partials and fulls as Adobe Acrobat .PDF files. Those files are tougher to change/edit (you need a tool to do so), so it gives authors some security and peace of mind, says author and agent Lois Winston. You can make a .PDF file with Acrobat. I don't think you can make one with the free Acroread reader. We have Acrobat because I used to have a "real job" and had to send documents around for review while keeping dolts from editing the files. (grin) It costs money, though. That might be worth it, if an agent asks you to send .PDF files. (You can't create a .PDF file by saving in a different format in MS-WORD on the PC, although I hear that you *CAN* on the Mac version of Word. The Mac is really cool, but I don't let myself be tempted these days. *grin*)

(Another "useful" entry so soon? Weird.)

Comments

[wildcelticrose.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the reminder.

That's one of those things that I know, but it's pretty much stored on one of my brain's "floppy disks"

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

The freeware suite Open Office (http://openoffice.org) can save files as .PDF, and can work with (among others) several generations of Word files.

There are also programs specifically for converting text to .PDF.

[aibhinn.livejournal.com]

I love track changes in my editing phase; it means that I can go in and play around with the words, without losing what I've already done. It also means that I can send things out to my beta readers and let them see not only what I've done, but what the beta reader before them has done. (Often we do what we call "circle critiques"; I'll send a story to person A, who makes comments/suggestions and passes it to person B, who does the same thing, and so on. This is quite useful, as it allows not only "Me too!" comments, but also "I'm not sure I agree" comments. You can imagine how much that helps. The document does end up looking as though I spilled rainbow ink all over it sometimes, but it helps me immensely.