Remove Word Metadata

Word hides names in seven places

Document properties are the obvious ones: author, organization, dates. But clearing them is only half the job. The name of everyone who edited the file also sits inside every revision, every comment, and in a separate list of everyone who opened the document for editing.

Strip the author from the properties and send the file, and it still goes out with names inside.

Editing session stamps

Every time you save, Word writes a session stamp, the rsid, into the document. Two different files that were edited in one session on one machine carry matching stamps, and the sequence of edits can be rebuilt paragraph by paragraph.

These stamps are not in the document properties, and the Document Inspector leaves them alone. They live in a separate part of the file.

What else travels with the file

• the path to the template, often a network folder like \\srv-files\Shablony;
• links to files on a local disk, together with the account name;
• custom organizational properties: classification label, department, document-management number;
• a thumbnail of the first page, visible in the file manager even when the file was never opened;
• hidden text: Word does not show it on screen, but it sits in the file as a plain line;
• total editing time in minutes, page and character counts;
• dates stored in the archive records themselves.

What stays untouched

The document text, layout, tables and pictures stay as they are. Revisions and comments remain too, only the signatures under them are removed: you can still see that a fragment was added or deleted, but not by whom.

Comments and hidden text are content, not metadata, so the tool removes them through separate checkboxes.

The old doc format

Files in the doc format are built differently: it is a binary container where properties sit in separate streams. Their values are overwritten in place, and the file's size and structure stay unchanged, because rebuilding such a container in a browser risks corrupting the document.

The old format keeps traces elsewhere too: the names of recent savers, leftovers from fast save. The safer route is to open the file in Word, save it as docx, and clean it here. The tool tells you this directly.

Other formats

Spreadsheets in xlsx and presentations in pptx work the same way and can be cleaned here too. For PDF documents there is removing PDF metadata, for photos there is clearing image metadata and viewing EXIF.