MS Office: Removing Hidden Data from MS Office Documents

When you create, open, or save a document in Microsoft Office, the document may contain content that you may not want to share with others when you distribute the document electronically. This information is known as metadata. Metadata is used for a variety of purposes to enhance the editing, viewing, filing, and retrieval of Office documents.

Because Microsoft Office stores revision marks, deleting text from a document does not always removed the text from the file. It may be stored in the documents revision history.

Microsoft provides extensive documentation on dealing with these issues:

• How to minimize metadata in Office documents
• How to minimize metadata in Word 2003
• Related Documents