ScrubDrop › Guides

Accept or reject? What happens to your Word document when you strip tracked changes

Last updated: 30 September 2026

What a tracked change stores

ECMA-376, the published specification of the .docx format, covers revisions in §17.13.5. Each revision has a type and an identifier, and optionally "the author of the revision" and "the date and time of the revision". Deleted text is not removed: a deletion "stores the current state of the text as deleted" (§17.13.5.14), so the words are still in the file, marked as deleted. Formatting changes store the earlier formatting (§17.13.5.31). Moves are stored twice, once where the text came from and once where it went (§17.13.5.21 to §17.13.5.26).

So a document with tracked changes carries, for each edit, who made it, when, and — for deletions — what the text used to say. That is exactly what makes it useful between colleagues, and exactly what you may not want a counterparty, a client or the public to read. New York State Bar Association Ethics Opinion 782 (2004) names "recent revisions of the document" and "comments inserted in the document in the drafting or editing process" among what metadata can reveal, and concludes that lawyers must use reasonable care to prevent the disclosure of metadata containing client confidences or secrets.

Accept: the text as it now reads

Accepting a change makes it final, as Microsoft's page Accept or reject tracked changes in Word puts it. Inserted text becomes ordinary text; deleted text is dropped; new formatting stays. Accepting everything gives you the document as it looks with markup switched on and the strike-through text ignored.

That is usually what people mean by "clean it up before sending", and it is the right choice when the tracked changes are your own side's agreed edits.

It is the wrong choice when some of the changes are proposals you have not agreed. If a counterparty's redline is still in the document, Accept All adopts all of it, including the clause you meant to push back on.

Reject: the text as it was

Rejecting a change "gets rid of" it. Insertions disappear, deleted text returns, formatting goes back to what it was. Rejecting everything takes the document back to how it read before the tracked edits — which also discards any edits you made yourself while tracking was on. Anything edited while tracking was off was never recorded as a revision and stays as it is.

Rejecting all is useful when you want to send the original with the changes as a separate conversation, or when you received a marked-up file and need to return the text you sent.

Per author: somewhere in between

Often the right answer is neither: accept your own team's edits and reject someone else's, or the other way round. Word supports this through its reviewer filter. Microsoft's page notes that if you are viewing only one reviewer's changes, Accept All Shown accepts only that reviewer's changes. Do one reviewer at a time and re-read the result.

Details that catch people out

• Comments are separate. Accepting or rejecting changes does not remove comments; Microsoft gives separate steps for them.
• Paragraph marks can be revisions too. ECMA-376 §17.13.5.15 describes a deleted paragraph mark: accepting it joins the paragraph to the next one. After accepting, check paragraph breaks and numbering where paragraphs were merged or split.
• No Markup is a view, not an edit. It changes what you see, not what the file holds.
• Revisions are not the only trace. Document properties are stored in a separate part of the file, and Word files also record editing-session identifiers, which we cover in our rsid guide. Dealing with the tracked changes leaves both of those where they were.

When Word's own tools are enough

For a single document you have read through, Word is enough: review each change, accept or reject it, delete the comments, then (on Windows) run Document Inspector, whose Word inspectors include "Comments, Revisions, Versions, and Annotations" (Microsoft's list). On a Mac, Word has no document inspector, according to Microsoft, so the manual review is the whole of it.

What ScrubDrop does with tracked changes

ScrubDrop reads the .docx in your browser (it is not uploaded) and lists the tracked changes it finds, with who made them, alongside comments, properties and the other hidden data. Then:

• Free: removes tracked changes by accepting them, and removes comments and document properties, one file at a time.
• ScrubDrop Pro: lets you reject them instead, or choose accept or reject per author; handles several files at once; and produces an audit report.

After rebuilding the file, ScrubDrop reads it again with separate parsers, including docx-redline-js, to confirm that no revision marks remain, and will not offer a file that fails. Some documents are refused rather than guessed at, including text hidden through styles and fields split across paragraphs, because accepting or rejecting there could change the text in ways that are hard to see.

ScrubDrop cannot tell which changes you agreed to. It applies the choice you make, so make that choice after reading the changes, not before. And the re-check is a strong signal, not a promise: open the result and read it before sending.

How to check this yourself

1. Work on a copy. On the Review tab, set the display to show all markup rather than No Markup, so nothing is hidden by the view.
2. Go through the changes one by one, or filter the view to one reviewer and use Accept All Shown for a reviewer whose edits you agree with.
3. Delete all comments.
4. With all markup still shown, confirm that no marked insertions, struck-through deletions or comments remain.
5. On Windows, run File › Info › Check for Issues › Inspect Document and confirm it finds no revisions or comments.
6. Read the final text from start to finish, looking at merged paragraphs and numbering.

Questions