Word: Removing reviewer names

J asked:

Do you know how to turn off the name of the reviewer to make a review anonymous?

While you can’t turn off/remove an individual reviewer’s name as far as I can find out (Yes you can — see further information at the end of this post on how to do this, based on Tyler’s comment from 10 April 2013), you can remove ALL reviewers names from your document, just leaving the markup/comments, but without names.

A little bit of Googling found that you can remove ALL reviewer names from a document, but not just one. See these:

• http://office.microsoft.com/en-au/word-help/change-the-author-name-for-review-comments-HA010036415.aspx (see the instructions in the ‘Make reviewer names anonymous’ section).
• http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2003-word/change-reviewer-information-in-word/72b87bc8-f56d-40ff-bdee-aba4bbf3b5fb?msgId=79a7422a-aff7-4890-b3e2-0d989089c4c2

You can also change YOUR user name (Review > Track Changes > Change User Name), but no-one else’s. Be aware that making this change applies to ALL Office documents you create.

If you want to change the information about the author etc., then in Word 2010 you can go to File > Info and click Properties on the far right panel, then Advanced Properties to display the old Document Properties box you used to see in Word 2003.

Doing a File > Save As will NOT change the original author/company details; you can only change this manually in the Document Properties dialog box.

To remove a single reviewer’s name from Comments

With thanks to Tyler Moore (comment dated 10 April 2013) for enough information for me to write up this solution fully.

1. Make sure the document you are working on is in Word 2007 or later format (i.e. DOCX extension).
2. Save a COPY of this document and WORK ON THE COPY ONLY until you’re satisfied you’ve achieved what you want. If you make an unrecoverable error, you can always go back to your original.
3. Close the Word document.
4. Go to the file location of the copy of the document and change its extension from docx to zip. Say Yes to make this change.
5. Double-click the new zip file and open it in WinZip or similar. Do NOT extract the files. (I only have WinZip, so the rest of these steps relate to WinZip; your zip software should work similarly).
6. Within WinZip, double-click the word folder — there will be several XML files listed.
7. Right-click on the comments.xml file and select a text editor to open it with (e.g. EditPlus, Expression Web, even Notepad if you have nothing else though other text editor show color-coded syntax and are easier to read).
8. Once open, press Ctrl+H to open the Replace dialog box (if Ctrl+H doesn’t work in your text editor, find the Find/Replace tool and open it).
9. In the Find What field, type w:author=”<reviewer name>” where you substitute <reviewer name> for the name of the reviewer you want to remove; e.g. if the reviewer’s name is Joe Bloggs, then type w:author=”Joe Bloggs”.
10. In the Replace With field, type w:author=”” (i.e. no name).
11. Click Replace All.
12. In the Find What field, type w:initials=”<reviewer initials>” where you substitute <reviewer initials> for the initials of the reviewer you want to remove; e.g. if the reviewer’s initials are JB then type w:initials=”JB”.
13. In the Replace With field, type w:initials=”” (i.e. no initials).
14. Click Replace All.
15. Repeat steps 9 to 14 for any other reviewer names/initials you want to remove.
16. Save the comments.xml file. If you’re asked to update the zip file, do so (in WinZip, choose the Update zip file with changes option).
17. Right-click on the document.xml file and select a text editor to open it with.
18. Once open, press Ctrl+H to open the Replace dialog box.
19. In the Find What field, type w:author=”<reviewer name>” where you substitute <reviewer name> for the name of the reviewer you want to remove; e.g. if the reviewer’s name is Joe Bloggs, then type w:author=”Joe Bloggs”.
20. In the Replace With field, type w:author=”” (i.e. no name).
21. Click Replace All.
22. Typically, the document.xml file doesn’t store the initials, but to be certain press Ctrl+F and search for w:initials. If there’s nothing found, move on to the next step. If you get a match, follow steps 12 to 14, then move on to the next step.
23. Repeat steps 19 to 22 for any other reviewer names you want to remove.
24. Save the document.xml file. If you’re asked to update the zip file, do so (in WinZip, choose the Update zip file with changes option).
25. Close the zip program.
26. Change the file extension back to docx.
27. Open the Word document. If all went well, you should now have comments with dates, but no initials or reviewer names for the reviewers you removed.
28. If all is good, archive off the original document and start using the revised one.

Troubleshooting: If you get an error when opening the Word document, or you find all the comments are missing (!) it’s likely that you inadvertently removed a required space between elements in the XML file(s). How do I know? Because I did it! The solution is to rename the file as a zip file again, open the zip file, open the comments.xml and document.xml files in a text editor and look for things like w:id=”25″w:author=”” — there should be a space between the ending ” of the first part and the following w (i.e. it should be w:id=”25″ w:author=””). Do a find for “w: (no spaces) and replace with ” w: (a space between the ” and the w). Save the changes, update and close the zip file, and rename the file back to a docx file.

[Links last checked April 2013]