In other situations, there are privacy concerns with the way Microsoft Office attaches Metadata and personal information to the documents.ġ. Other Situations Where Hidden Data May Cause Problems While it is quite common in business to sublet work, you may not want to reveal this info to your clients. 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. Consequences of Hidden Data in Office FilesĪpart 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.įor example, you may report to the client that your company spent 120 man-hours to create the document. Hidden text or cells that you may not be aware of. The name of your computer, the name of the network server or hard disk where the document is saved.ĥ. Date the document was created, date the document was modified, document revisions, document versions.Ĥ. 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.ģ. This version is the first release on CNET .2. The Offrhdreadme.htm file included with the add-in includes a complete list of all of the types of data that the tool will help to remove. Or, you can run Remove Hidden Data on multiple files at once from the command line. You can run the Remove Hidden Data add-in on individual files from within your Office XP or Office 2003 application.
The Remove Hidden Data add-in is a tool that you can use to remove personal or hidden data that might not be immediately apparent when you view the document in your Microsoft Office application.
When you distribute an Office document electronically, the document might contain information that you do not want to share publicly, such as information youve designated as hidden or information that allows you to collaborate on writing and editing the document with others.
With this add-in you can permanently remove hidden and collaboration data, such as change tracking and comments, from Word 2003/XP, Excel 2003/XP, and PowerPoint 2003/XP files.