When we talk about a text editor like Microsoft‘s, we not only find a program to create and edit documents. Its operation goes much further and its characteristics can help or harm us in some cases. This is something that, for example, happens with access to recent Word documents , a topic that we are going to delve into.
Many of you are fully aware of the power and versatility of this particular application. It is part of the popular Redmond office suite, Office. This is a suite that has been around for a good number of years and that has not stopped growing and improving. This is achieved largely thanks to all the functions and characteristics that its programs present to us by default. Here we find the well-known spreadsheet application, Excel, or the Word text editor that most of you already know well.
Well, it is in this second title that we want to focus on these same lines. Specifically, we refer to the powerful text editor that is integrated into the aforementioned suite and that most of us have used on many occasions. It has both advanced and basic functions so that we can get the most out of the program as such. However, it is not always enough if you only learn to use the basics of Microsoft Word . This is something that is especially evident if we use it on a daily basis.
Therefore, in many cases it is not interesting to know some of its secrets and thus gain productivity and even privacy. And we must bear in mind that on many occasions here we deal with documents that we do not want to fall into the hands of third parties. It can be personal, private text documents or with sensitive content that we do not want to fall into the wrong hands.
Improve privacy when working in Word
Although it may seem a bit strange to talk about security and privacy in a program like Word, it is a very important section. In fact, it is recommended to put into practice some habits related to security to maintain privacy in our work here. An example is the case that we will talk about below, the recent documents that the program shows us as such. These are found by just taking a look at the main menu of it. Specifically, we only have to go to the File / Open section.
Here we find a direct access to the last documents opened in the program itself. Therefore, to access them again, we only have to click on them to see them on the screen again. This is something that can save us a good amount of time in some cases. But in the event that there are several users who use the same application , it can also be a serious privacy problem.
Delete recent documents from the text editor
Therefore, to safeguard our privacy in the program , something we can do is delete that list of recent documents in Microsoft Word that we are talking about. In this way, as we will see, we are not only going to improve and clean the Word start screen, but also avoid any prying eyes at our previous documents. This list of recent documents appears on the left side of the screen when we access the menu option discussed above.
But you have to know that we have the possibility to delete all the entries of the last open files. In the same way, as we will see later, we can also deactivate the existence of this list completely so that it does not record any open files from now on. Thus, clearing or deactivating the list also removes all file names from the Open option within Word.
To remove items from this list, once Word is started, we go to File / Open to see the recent list. This appears on the left of the main screen, so we only have to click with the right button of the mouse on any name of the documents displayed here. Next, in the options that appear, we select Delete undocked documents .
Then we just have to click on the delete confirmation in the next dialog box. At that time all shortcuts to recently opened Word documents are removed from the list. At the same time we can also delete the record of a single document. We do this by right-clicking on a document and selecting the Remove from list option to remove just that shortcut.
Turn off the recent documents list
As we mentioned before, we also have the possibility to completely deactivate this list of recent documents forever. It is created automatically and by default, but this is something that we can change if we wish. To do this, the first thing we do is open any Word document. Next we go to the menu option File / Options. At that moment, a new window will appear on the screen with a huge amount of customizable parameters.
Among the categories that we find in it, in this case we are interested in the so-called Advanced. We click on it, and now we have to locate the Display section.
Therefore, at this point, in order to disable the display of recent documents, we set the Show this number of recent documents option to zero. Once this is done we click on the Accept button. Saying that this deletes the documents, the shortcuts to recent Word documents, and also permanently disables the list that we have talked about in these lines.
With all this, what we achieve to a great extent is to increase the privacy of the Microsoft program. This will be especially useful in the event that there are several users who use this same program. This way they will not be able to view or access the latest text documents that have been opened in Word.
