Turning Off the Date and Time Shown in a Comment

When Kay adds a comment to a document, the date and time that the comment was created is automatically added to the comment. Kay wonders if she can turn this off so that the date and time don't show up in the comment.

There is no way to omit the date and time from a comment; the inclusion of this information seems to be hard-wired into Word. The only way to do it is to remove metadata from the document, which may actually be overkill.

To understand how to remove the metadata, make a copy of your document, the one that has comments in it. Then, open that document and launch the Document Inspector using one of these methods, depending on your version of Word:

• If you are using Word 2007, click the Office button, Prepare, and then Inspect Document.
• If you are using Word 2010, 2013, or 2016, display the File tab of the ribbon, click on Check for Issues, and then select Inspect Document from the drop-down menu.
• If you are using Word 2019 or the version provided with Office 365, display the File tab of the ribbon, click on Info at the left side of the screen, click Check for Issues, and then select Inspect Document from the drop-down menu. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The Document Inspector.

You can leave the checkboxes in the Document Inspector just as they are, and then click the Inspect button. You'll end up seeing a report from the Document Inspector. (See Figure 2.)

Figure 2. The Document Inspector's report.

Since you are working with a copy of your document, you can go ahead and click on the Remove All button to the right of the Document Properties and Personal Information category. (That's the only one you really need to click for our purposes in this testing.) Then, click Close and save your document.

Now you can see that the date and time associated with comments has been deleted. In addition, all of the comment authors have been changed to a generic name, such as "Author."

This approach alters more than just the date and time display, which is why I said that it could be "overkill" for some folks. You will need to make the determination if the results of this approach are more acceptable than just allowing the date and time to be displayed.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (13789) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021.