Remove personal or hidden information

File Properties

These properties include Author, Manager, Company, and Last Saved By.

Some Word features use the personal information in file properties. When you remove this information, these features may not work as desired. Removing personal information affects the following features:

• Send to Mail Recipient (for Review)
• Tracked changes
• Information Rights Management
• Online collaboration
• Document Workspace sites
• Letters and mailings
• Comments (names are removed)
• Metadata-based search engines, such as FindFast and Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server search engines (documents can be indexed by limited data only, such as content and title)

Other hidden information

For example, hidden text, revised text, comments, or field codes can remain in a document even though you don’t see such information or expect it to be in the final version. If you entered personal information, such as your name or e-mail address, when you registered your software, some Microsoft Office documents store that information as part of the document. Information contained in custom fields that you add to the document, such as an "author" or "owner" field, is not automatically removed. You must edit or remove the custom field to remove that information.

1. To quickly display tracked changes or comments, click Markup on the View menu.
2. On the Reviewing toolbar, click Next , and then click Accept Change or Reject Change to make the revisions permanent.
3. Accept or reject changes until there are no more tracked changes in the document.

Notes

• Clicking Markup on the View menu will show or hide all markup in the document. When you show all markup, all types of markup and all reviewers' names will be selected on the Show menu.
• If you hide a type of markup by clearing it on the Show menu, the markup automatically appears each time the document is opened unless you clear the Make hidden markup visible when opening or saving check box on the Security tab of the Options dialog box (Tools menu). Even if you clear this check box, the markup is still in the document and can be revealed by selecting the type of markup on the Show menu.

• To view hidden text, click Options on the Tools menu, click the View tab, and then select the Hidden text check box under Formatting marks.

• To omit hidden text in a printed document, click Options on the Tools menu, click the Print tab, and then clear the Hidden text check box under Include with document. If you plan to distribute the document online, just delete the hidden text as you would delete any other text.

If you specified that Microsoft Word save one or more versions of your document in the same file, those versions are saved as hidden information in the document, so that you can retrieve them later. Because versions of a document are available to others and because they do not remain hidden if you or someone else saves the document in another format, you may want to remove the versions before you share the document.

• If you want to keep the previous versions, save the current version as a separate document, and then distribute only that document.

  How?

  1. On the File menu, click Versions.
  2. Click the version of the document you want to save as a separate file.
  3. Click Open.
  4. On the File menu, click Save As.
  5. In the File name box, enter a name, and then click Save.
• If you don't want to keep the previous versions, delete the unwanted versions, and then distribute the document.

  How?

  1. On the File menu, click Versions.
  2. Click the version of the document you want to delete.
  3. To select more than one version, hold down CTRL as you click each version.
  4. Click Delete.

Do one of the following:

• To show or hide the field code for a specific field, click the field or the field results, and then press SHIFT+F9.
• To show or hide field codes for all fields in the document, press ALT+F9.

Note  Because field codes can be visible to anyone reading your document, be sure that the information you place in field codes is not information that you want kept private.

If you save a document with the Allow fast saves check box selected and then open the document as a text file, the document may contain information that you previously deleted. This happens because a "fast save" appends the changes you make to the end of the document; it doesn't incorporate the changes (including deleted information) into the document itself.

To completely remove the deleted information from the document, do the following:

1. If you opened the document as a text file, close the text file and open the document as a regular Word document.
2. On the Tools menu, click Options, click the Save tab, and then clear the Allow fast saves check box.
3. On the File menu, click Save.

When you compare and merge documents, Microsoft Word uses randomly generated numbers to help keep track of related documents. Although these numbers are hidden, they could potentially be used to demonstrate that two documents are related. If you choose not to store these numbers, the results of merged documents will be less than optimal.

1. On the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the Security tab.
2. Clear the Store random number to improve merge accuracy check box.

• In the Start enforcing protection dialog box, do one of the following:
  • Click Password, and then type and confirm a password in the boxes provided.
  • Click User authentication.