Have you ever noticed that when you create an Office document, it’s immediately branded with your name, the date and time it was created and other data that you don’t necessarily want the recipient to know? They can sometimes even contain comments and revision data that you’d rather keep confidential.
Normally, having such meta data attached to your documents is no big deal and indeed, sometimes extremely useful for other users to know. However, what happens if you publish that document on the internet? Do you really want others knowing your personal credentials and document history? If not, then did you know that Microsoft have a special Office 2003 plugin called Remove Hidden Data which allows you to select which data you want attached to your documents. If you’ve got anything higher than Office 2007, then you won’t need to worry about this function because it’s already built in but if you haven’t upgraded from 2003, this plugin is your only option.
The plugin allows you to permanently remove hidden and collaboration data, such as change tracking and comments, from Word 2003/XP, Excel 2003/XP, and PowerPoint 2003/XP files. You can run the Remove Hidden Data add-in on individual files from within your Office XP or Office 2003 application. Or, you can run Remove Hidden Data on multiple files at once from the command line. In either case, to run the tool you must have the application installed in which the document was created.
