How to see who last edited a Word document

By Check Before Send · Updated 8 October 2026

Word records who last saved a document and when, and keeps it inside the file, so it travels with the document to everyone you send it to. You can read it in a few places in Word, and anyone who receives the file can read it too.

Below: where to look, what the file actually stores, and how to remove those names before you send a document on.

Where to look in Word

The Info page. Select the File tab, then Info. Microsoft's description of the Info tab says its document properties include when and by whom the file was last edited. Microsoft's page on viewing or changing properties also points to a Show All Properties link at the bottom of that page.

Advanced Properties. On the same page, choose Properties and then Advanced Properties. Microsoft lists the fields you can see and edit there as Title, Subject, Author, Manager, Company, Category, Keywords and Comments.

Version history. If the file is stored in OneDrive or SharePoint, Word can show earlier versions. Microsoft says version history in Microsoft 365 only works for files stored in OneDrive or SharePoint. In Microsoft 365 you click the title of the file and choose Version history; in Office 2016 to 2021 you go to File, then History.

Tracked changes. If Track Changes was on, each change is marked with the person who made it. Microsoft says the All Markup view shows changes in different colors for each reviewer, and the Show Markup menu has a Specific People option so you can look at one reviewer at a time. If you cannot see the changes at all, start with why you can't see tracked changes in Word.

What the file actually stores

To show what is stored, we ran Check Before Send on a small Word file we made for this purpose. Every name and date below was invented for the test; a real document carries the names your own copy of Word used.

What the check found	Value in the test file
Author	Jordan Smith
Last modified by	Jordan Smith
Created	2026-01-05 10:00 (UTC)
Last saved	2026-01-09 16:30 (UTC)
Company	Acme Corp

Author and last modified by are separate fields. In the test file they match, but in a real document they differ when someone else saves it after you, which is how a colleague's name ends up in a file you thought was only yours. Microsoft's developer reference for a document's package properties says the same thing in its own terms: last modified by is the property that identifies the user who last modified the content, and it sits beside separate properties for the creator and the modified date.

Removing the names before you send

In Word. Microsoft's Document Inspector does this: go to File, then Info, choose Check for Issues, then Inspect Document. Among other things it can remove document properties and personal information such as author details. Microsoft warns that you should run it on a copy of your document, because the removal cannot always be undone, and you might not be able to bring the data back with Undo.

With Check Before Send. Drop the document into the page and it lists each value it found, with the actual value shown: the author, the last modified by name, the dates and the company in the table above, plus things like comments and hidden text. You choose what to remove and it makes a new copy, leaving your original unchanged. It then opens the new copy again and scans it a second time; a row shows "Verified not found" only if that second scan no longer finds the value.

Two limits. It works on .docx files, and older .doc files are not supported yet. And "verified not found" means the second scan found nothing, not that the document is guaranteed clean: names and addresses in the body text are not found automatically, so you add those yourself as your own terms.

The document is read inside your browser and is never uploaded. You can confirm that yourself using the steps on the Trust Center.

Sources

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