Track-Change Scrubber

Word documents carry far more with them than you see on screen. A seemingly clean file often still holds tracked changes that are merely hidden, comments from internal discussions, the name of every person who ever worked on it, the company, the template, the total editing time and a whole revision history. Send such a document out and you often send more than you would like.

That is exactly what Track-Change Scrubber cleans up. First the tool scans your DOCX file and shows you in black and white what is inside: how many insertions, deletions, format changes, comments and hidden text passages it finds, and which author and metadata are stored. You see the changes it found with author, date and a text preview before you remove anything.

You can resolve tracked changes two ways. Accept applies all changes as if someone had signed off on them - inserted text stays, deleted text disappears. Reject undoes them and restores the original state. Either way, afterwards there is no change history left in the document, just clean, final text.

You decide the cleanup with checkboxes: author information like creator, last editor and company, comments and annotations, hidden text, document properties like title and keywords, the revision history including editing time, custom XML data parts and template information. Ready-made presets bundle the typical cases, for example everything for sending externally or the minimum for an anonymous document.

Because there are often real legal questions behind this topic, there is a dedicated view with the relevant GDPR references and an assessment of which metadata carries which privacy risk. For documents that go to authorities, opposing parties or the public, that is the difference between a clean send and an unwanted disclosure.

The scrubbing runs in the browser and your documents stay on your device. You can load several files at once and work through them as a batch - handy when a whole contract folder or a stack of quotes needs to go out and all must be treated the same.