Another Good Reason to Convert: to avoid being caught out by tracked changes

For most users, the main reason to convert a Microsoft Word document to a Portable Document Format (PDF) document is so that the recipient will easily be able to open and view it. It's a sort of translation service that uses a neutral third language, if you will.

The fact is, however, Convert doc file into PDF holds benefits that a lot of users don't recognize. In this article we'd like to discuss a really important benefit, which is to remove the possibility of unintended ‘secret leakage'.

So what is unintended secret leakage, and how does it happen? Unintended secret leakage is when your organization inadvertently reveals something that was supposed to remain confidential within the organization. Of course, any organization is going to have its secrets, from personal information about customers, to future strategy and potentially embarrassing opinions about suppliers and competitors.

As for how unintended secret leakage happens, the big culprit is ‘tracked changes'. This is a feature in Microsoft Word that allows people to make and track changes to a document. Anyone who has worked in a large company or government department will know that it's a popular way for a group of people to collaborate on something while it is being developed. The problem is that tracked changes have to be enabled in a document in order to see them. Turn off tracked changes, and they disappear, but are still contained in the document.

So what has happened time and time again is that an organization has worked on a report using the tracked changes feature, then someone has turned off the tracked changes and the report has been made public. All a recipient has to then do is to open the document and turn tracked changes back on and voila - secrets from earlier versions of the document are revealed.

Happily, Convert word to PDF is an easy way around this problem. MS word to PDF conversion will automatically erase old text stored in track changes. Yet another great reason to use document conversion software!

Hardley Davidson

Site Representative

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