How to Cull Metadata From Your MS Word Documents

[ May 31st, 2008 @ 12:56 pm ] ... [ C. S. Magor ]

How to Cull Metadata From Your MS Word Documents - Part 2

MS Word

In the previous article, we looked at an easy way to cull metadata in MS Word documents. The same method could equally well be applied to MS Excel or Powerpoint. It does allow you to selectively remove just about all of the metadata from your document, but does not cover all of your bases.

The following method deals with reviewer metadata that is included in documents. There can be plenty of reasons why you don’t want your reviewers’ information to be visible. If you want to learn how to get rid of it, read on.

Recently I found myself in a position where a document reviewer had revealed a little personal information that a client did not really need to see. While it was no big deal, I thought that in the interests of privacy, it would be best to eliminate the information. The trouble was, there were some 80 comments accompanying the document explaining the various changes that had been tracked.

I wanted to keep the comments in my document but change or eliminate the name that accompanies them. It was a situation that I had not come across before and I scarcely knew where to begin. I figured I could rewrite them all manually, but as the situation is bound to pop up again sooner or later, I figured learning how to deal with it automatically would be the best solution. I scoured the Internet did a little trial and error and came up with the following method.

Step 1
Back up your file. A misstep here can literally wipe out all of the comments in your document in one fell swoop. It is very easy to do, you have been warned. In the picture below you see that the comments by the reviewer contain initials. If you mouse over the comments, they will actually reveal more information. There is a process that deals with this metadata, but it requires a little care.

Step 2
Click the Office Button and open the Prepare Document menu.

Step 3
Click Inspect Document, the Document Inspector will open. You can check all of the boxes as this step only looks for metadata, it does not actually change any of it. Just click Inspect in the bottom right corner of the Document Inspector screen.

MS Word Document Inspector

Step 4

Click Remove All next to Document Properties and Personal Information. Do Not click Remove All next to Comments, Revisions, Versions and Annotations. If you do the latter, your comments will disappear.

Step 5

Save your document in order for the changes to take effect. You will now see that the initials have been replaced by an “A1…” series, as can be seen in the screen shot. Note that the changes will not be visible until you have saved.

The reviewer name has now been removed from the comments in your document. To remove any other metadata in the document, simply refer to the previous article.

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