Ever heard of the term metadata? Quite literally, metadata is data about data – that is to say, data that typically is used to describe another piece of data. Metadata is typically encapsulated inside the data it is describing. Photo tagging is quite popular and a now accepted way of tagging and organizing your myriad of pictures. Previously, we often described photos by giving them a unique filename. Today, tagging photos is a type of metadata that accompanies each photo. Another every day example is MP3 and the ID3 tags – metadata that contains the artist, album, genre, etc. But, did you know that Microsoft Office documents contain a similar concept when it comes to metadata?
Metadata in the Microsoft world can reveal bits of previous versions of the document, the original authors, and dates of edits. This is the type of information that have the privacy folks squirming. As documents are passed around by email it is trivial to uncover the metadata, and it isn’t just limited to Word documents, but all of Microsoft’s Office formats, like PowerPoint. Outside of potential embarrassment there could also be a liability problem if the metadata isn’t sanitized or scrubbed.
So what is your document hiding? In Word, for example, open the document and then navigate to File->Properties or in Word 2007 click the Office Orb->Prepare->Properties.
While often times the embedded metadata isn’t damning at all sometimes a little piece of mind is worth the effort it takes to remove it. Thankfully, Office 2007 makes this quite simple.
Again, click the Office 2007 Orb ->Prepare->Inspect Document.
The Document Inspector wizard will launch. Check off all the boxes in order to search for all the various bits if data then click Inspect.
The Inspector will return with it’s results and allow you to remove any of the information it finds with a click of a button.
That’s really all there is to it. If you have Office 2003 Microsoft has a tool available that you may download for free that does the same thing I just showed you for Office 2007.
