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Microsoft Office automatically saves hidden metadata and personal information to all documents that you create using the Microsoft Office Program. In this post you will be learning how to remove hidden information and metadata from Microsoft Office documents, so as to prevent anyone from making use of this information.

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Hidden Information Attached to Office Files.

View and Remove Hidden Data. On Office 2013 or Office 2010, click the File menu, click Info and the Inspect Document tool will be front-and-center, informing you about the potentially sensitive information that the document contains. This information is more obvious than it is in older versions of Office, but it’s still easy to miss if you’re not aware Office adds this sensitive data to. Jul 26, 2019 Open the Word document. Click on File. Click on Info. On the right side, click the Check for Issues menu. Quick tip: Under the 'Inspect Document' section, you'll see an overview of the contents that you may want to remove from the file. Select the Inspect Document option. Check the contents that you want to inspect. 2020-4-2  This information is typically displayed when you hover over a Word file, or if you open the Properties menu for the file and click the Details tab. But you can follow the instructions below to remove that personal information from the Word 2010 file. Step 1: Open the Word document from which you wish to remove your personal information. It will look odd, but you should be able to make out what most of the information means. There are two XML files that may contain your name: core.xml in the docProps folder, and document.xml and people.xml, both in the word folder. How to Delete Metadata from Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. Jun 29, 2012 Step 1: Open the Word document from which you wish to remove your personal information. Step 2: Click the File tab at the top-left corner of the window. Step 3: Click Info in the column at the left side of the window. Step 4: Click the Check for Issues drop-down menu, then click Inspect Document.

Microsoft Office by default saves the following information anytime you create and save a file an Office document.

1. Author name, Company name, name of person who recently saved the document. Other personally identifiable information (PII), such as e-mail headers, send-for-review information, routing slips, and template names.

2. Shared or collaborated documents might contain revision marks, comments, ink annotations, names of people who worked on the document, comments from reviewers and changes that were made to the document.

3. Date the document was created, date the document was modified, document revisions, document versions.

4. The name of your computer, the name of the network server or hard disk where the document is saved.

5. Hidden text or cells that you may not be aware of.

Consequences of Hidden Data in Office Files

Apart from conveying sensitive information, hidden data attached to your files may also create misunderstandings in case there are inconsistencies between what you report in person about the work and what the document ends up conveying through its attached hidden information and metadata.

For example, you may report to the client that your company spent 120 man-hours to create the document. While someone on the client’s side might access the hidden data attached to your document and conclude that the document was created by another company and someone at your company hardly spent an hour looking at the document.

While it is quite common in business to sublet work, you may not want to reveal this info to your clients.

Other Situations Where Hidden Data May Cause Problems

In other situations, there are privacy concerns with the way Microsoft Office attaches Metadata and personal information to the documents.

1. You may register an anonymous complaint only to discover that your name and details were accessible through files hidden metadata.

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2. You may publish a document to a website, hoping to remain anonymous. However, unknown to you the document had enough information about you in the files hidden metadata.

3. There may be document headers, footers, watermarks and hidden text linked to your documents. These may convey sensitive information, trade secrets and other info which you may not want to be open about.

4. You or other people that worked on creating a document may have made certain comments/remarks that may not be appropriate to be sent to a client. These might get attached to your document and may not be obvious when you just view the document.

Hence, it makes all the sense to check and clear the hidden metadata from an office document before publishing it online or sending it to a client.

Remove Hidden Information From Office Documents

Here is how you can view and remove hidden data and personal information from office files created using Microsoft Office 2007, where the metadata is more hidden, compared to Office 2010 and 2013.

1. Open the file that you want to remove hidden information from.

2. Click the Office Button on the top ribbon menu (See image below)

3. Point to Prepare and Click on Inspect Document (See Image below).

4. You will be taken to Document Inspector screen, on this click on Inspect.

5. Windows will Inspect the Document and Display Inspection Results for your review (See image below).

6. Click on Remove All on the Document Properties and Personal Information Section to remove all your personal information that Office has attached to your document. You can extend this procedure to other sections that you want to remove.

7. On the Next Screen Windows will confirm Removal of Document Properties and Personal Information.

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As you can see from “Note: Some changes cannot be undone,” you will not be able to recover information that you will be deleting by this procedure.

Hence, you may wish to make a backup copy for your use and reference before clearing personal info and other data from file that you will be sending out.

Remove Hidden Data From Office 2010 and 2013 Documents

1. Click the File tab, and then click Info.

2. Click Check for Issues, and then click Inspect Document (See Image below).

3. You can leave all the selected options, ticked as they are or choose sections that you want to examine the document for.

4. Click Inspect and Office will examine the document for the selected hidden metadata.

5. Review the results of the document inspection in the Document Inspector dialog box.

6. Click the Remove All button next to the inspection results for the types of hidden data that you want to remove from the document.

Stop Office From Attaching Information

Unfortunately, there is really no way to tweak the settings and prevent Microsoft Office from saving personal information and metadata to files.

However, in Office 2013 you can set the Office file that you are working on to automatically remove meta data every time the file is saved. This way you can avoid the chances of you not remembering to remove hidden information from the file, before sending it to the client.

1. Click the File menu.

2. Click Options, and select the Trust Center category.

3. Click the Trust Center Settings button and select Privacy Options.

4. Enable the “Remove personal information from file properties on save” option.

Note: At times you may find “Remove Personal Information ….” option unavailable for ticking. If this is the case, click the Document Inspector button (see image above), let the Document Inspector remove all the hidden information attached to the document.

Next, you can save the file and try to access the Trust Center privacy options once again. This time the option should be available and you should be able to click the checkbox.

You need to be aware that this setting is limited to the current file only and does not apply to other files that you had created prior to this setting or to new files that you will be creating using Microsoft office. There is no way in Microsoft Office to set this setting as default or make it applicable system wide.

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The Document Inspector gives users an easy way to examine documents for personal or sensitive information, text phrases, and other document contents. They can use the Document Inspector to remove unwanted information; for example, before distributing a document.

Note

Microsoft does not support the automatic removal of hidden information for signed or protected documents, or for documents that use Information Rights Management (IRM). We recommend that you run the Document Inspector before you sign a document or invoke IRM on a document.

As a developer, you can use the Document Inspector framework to extend the built-in modules and integrate your extensions into the standard user interface.

The Document Inspector in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint includes the following enhancements.

Built-in Document Inspector modules

The Document Inspector has modules that help users inspect and fix specific elements of a given document. The Document Inspector includes the following built-in modules.

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For all Office documents

  • Embedded documents
  • OLE objects and packages
  • Data models
  • Content apps
  • Task Pane apps
  • Macros and VBA modules
  • Legacy macros (XLM and WordBasic)

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For Excel documents

  • PivotTables and slicers
  • PivotCharts
  • Cube formulas
  • Timelines (cache)
  • Custom XML data
  • Comments and annotations
  • Document properties and personal information
  • Headers and footers
  • Hidden rows and columns
  • Hidden worksheets and names
  • Invisible content
  • External links and data functions
  • Excel surveys
  • Custom worksheet properties

For PowerPoint documents

  • Comments and annotations
  • Document properties and personal information
  • Invisible on-slide content
  • Off-slide content
  • Presentation notes

For Word documents

  • Comments, revisions, versions, and annotations
  • Document properties and personal information; this includes metadata, SharePoint properties, custom properties, and other content information
  • Custom XML data
  • Headers, footers, and watermarks
  • Invisible content
  • Hidden text

Personal Info

Opening the Document Inspector

To open the Document Inspector:

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  1. Choose the File tab, and then choose Info.

  2. Choose Check for Issues.

  3. Choose Inspect Document.

Use the Document Inspector dialog box to select the type or types of data to find in the document.

After the modules complete the inspection, the Document Inspector displays the results for each module in a dialog box. If a given module finds data, the dialog box includes a Remove All button that you can click to remove that data. If the module does not find data, the dialog box displays a message to that effect.

If you choose to remove the data for a given module, the dialog box displays descriptive text that indicates whether the operation was successful or not. If the Document Inspector encounters errors during the operation, the module is flagged, displays an error message, and the data for that module does not change.

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Support and feedback

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