Many people don’t realize, but Microsoft Office tracks the history of your documents, and can be configured to store hidden comments and other editing notes. Office documents also track what is called metadata, such as the author and organization where the document was created.

It can sometimes be really embarrassing to share a document with someone, only to have them discover your previous comments.

If you ever want to scrub your documents history, here are a few links that might be helpful:

Try this if you have Office 2003/XP, or this if you have Office 2007.

Unfortunately, I haven’t had to do this with OpenOffice yet, so I’m not sure how to do it there.