Word to PDFHow to Convert Word to PDF Without Comments or Tracked Changes
Comment balloons and tracked-change marks land in your PDF because Word exported the marked-up view of the document rather than the document itself. Set the review display to No Markup, then check the export dialog: on Windows, Save As PDF, click Options, and make sure "Publish what" is set to Document and not "Document showing markup". That gets a clean file out the door in the next two minutes — the sections below cover cleaning the document itself, confirming the PDF really is clean, and the reviewer names that survive even after the markup is gone.
The fix when someone is waiting on the file
On Windows, go to the Review tab and open the display dropdown in the Tracking group — the one showing Simple Markup or All Markup — and choose No Markup. On Mac, the equivalent lives under Review > Markup Options. The revision bars and balloons disappear from the screen.
Then export: File > Save As (or Save a Copy) > PDF. On Windows, before you hit Save, click Options and confirm the Publish what setting — more on that in a moment, because it is the step most people skip.
Understand what you have just done, though. No Markup is a view. It changes what you see and what Word draws on the page; it changes nothing inside the .docx. The tracked changes and the comments are all still in the file. If you email the Word document instead of the PDF, the recipient opens it in whatever view their Word defaults to, and everything is back. A clean PDF from a dirty document is fine for the PDF. It is not a clean document.
The permanent fix: accept and delete, on a copy
Do this on a duplicate, not the working file. File > Save a Copy, name it something like proposal-client-final.docx, and work in that. Accepting changes is not something you want to undo three days later when the client asks what you altered in section 4.
In the copy:
- Review > Accept > Accept All Changes and Stop Tracking. The "and Stop Tracking" part matters — plain "Accept All Changes" leaves Track Changes switched on, so the next sentence you type starts a fresh round of markup.
- Review > the Delete dropdown in the Comments group > delete all comments in the document.
Those are two separate operations, and that surprises people. Microsoft split them apart: comments are no longer part of the Track Changes feature. Accepting every tracked change does not touch a single comment. If you only ran Accept All, your PDF will still have balloons.
One more thing worth checking before you export: comments marked Resolved are still comments. Resolving greys a thread out in the sidebar. It does not remove it from the file, and it does not remove it from a markup-enabled export.
The export dialog setting that overrides your view
This is the trap. On Windows, the PDF export has its own markup switch that is independent of what is on your screen, and it remembers whatever you chose last time.
Go File > Save As > choose PDF in the file type list, then click the Options button. In the dialog that opens, look at Publish what. There are two choices: Document and Document showing markup. Select Document. If someone on your team once exported a marked-up review copy from this machine, that radio button may still be sitting on the wrong option, quietly re-adding balloons to every PDF you have made since.
Word for Mac has no Publish what list. The save dialog offers a Best for printing option instead, which routes the file through a different rendering path — Microsoft's own documentation notes that hyperlinks may not convert correctly when you use it. Because there is no explicit markup toggle on Mac, the review display setting is doing all the work, which makes the verification step below non-optional rather than a nicety.
Confirm the PDF is clean before you send it
Do not trust the thumbnail. Open the finished PDF and press Ctrl+F (Windows) or Cmd+F (Mac), then search for the reviewer's surname, or for a word you know appeared only in a comment — "reword", "check this", "per our call". Comment text in a marked-up PDF is real, selectable, searchable text. If the search finds nothing, the balloons are genuinely gone rather than just scrolled off screen.
Then scroll to the end. Word sometimes places balloon overflow and a change summary on trailing pages, so a PDF that looks clean on page one can carry markup on page nine. Compare the PDF's page count to the document's. If the PDF has picked up extra pages you did not write, something came along for the ride.
Finally, open the PDF's document properties — File > Properties in Adobe Acrobat Reader — and read the Author field. That leads directly to the next problem.
The names that survive after the markup is gone
Deleting comments removes the balloons. It does not remove the author names stored in the file's properties, and those carry through into the PDF you generate. A document that has been round-tripped through three reviewers can name all three in its metadata even though the visible page is spotless. For a proposal going to a client who does not know you subcontracted part of it, that is a genuine disclosure.
Clean it in Word before exporting: File > Info > Check for Issues > Inspect Document. Run the inspection and look at two results in particular — Comments, Revisions, Versions, and Annotations, which is a useful second net for anything the Review tab missed, and Document Properties and Personal Information, which holds author names, the last person who saved the file, company name, and email headers.
Remove All on those two, then export. The Document Inspector's removals cannot be undone, which is the third reason to be working in a copy.
Why the converter on this site cannot leak a comment
The Word to PDF converter here runs entirely in your browser — the .docx is never uploaded anywhere — and it handles markup structurally rather than by setting a view. It has no code path for rendering a comment balloon at all. There is no option to turn on, no remembered setting, no way for a reviewer's note to reach the page, because the code that would draw one does not exist.
Tracked changes are resolved the same way: insertions are typeset as ordinary accepted text, deletions are dropped, and the PDF you get is always the clean, fully-accepted version of the document. You cannot produce a marked-up PDF with it, which is exactly the point when a clean one is what you need and you do not entirely trust the export dialog on a shared machine.
Be clear about the trade, though. The converter typesets with DejaVu Sans, so a document set in Calibri or Aptos will not look identical to Word's own export — see why fonts change during conversion. It also does not render headers, footers, or footnotes, and it reads .docx only. When the exact typeface and page furniture matter more than the markup risk, Word's own Export is the better tool, cleaned as described above. When you have no Word license on the machine in front of you, the options are wider than most people assume.
When you actually want the markup in the PDF
Sometimes the markup is the deliverable — an editor sending a marked-up manuscript to an author who does not have Word, or a legal redline archived for a file. To keep it: set the review display to All Markup, then in Save As > PDF > Options, set Publish what to Document showing markup.
Two practical notes. Use Review > Show Markup to switch off the categories you do not want first — formatting changes in particular produce a wall of noise about font and spacing tweaks nobody needs to read. And expect the layout to shift: Word reserves a margin strip for balloons, so the marked-up PDF paginates differently from the clean one. Never send both and describe them as the same document.
Remember that a markup PDF is a photograph, not a working file. Nobody can accept, reject, or reply to anything in it. If the recipient needs to act on the changes, send the .docx and send the PDF only as a reference they can open on a phone.