If you use Microsoft office word file to share your Documents then you should know that you are sharing many other information along with your main document in the form of Metadata. Metadata of Word documents contains many personal Information which should be cleaned before sharing the documents with anyone. Today I will show you how to clean the Metadata from your Office Word documents.
Depending on the settings or features you use, the Metadata may contain all kinds of additional information such as Hidden Revision Logs; A Unique, Identifying GUID; Comments, Keywords, Subjects, and other properties; Recent Hyperlinks; Last Saved Date ; Last Edited By Information; Last Printed Date; Revision Count; Total Editing Time and more. And I guess you don’t want everyone to know all about these. So it is a good Idea to remove all these information from your Word document before sharing with anyone else. For this we are going to use a very small utility called “Doc Scrubber”. Doc Scrubber can remove much of this metadata from Word documents, and can also produce an analysis of any Word document to show what metadata it contains.
To use the software, first go to the official website and Download Doc Scrubber. The installation process is straight forward and simple. The program’s main interface is very clean and simple.
In the main Interface there are two main options. “Analyze” and “Scrub”. You can click on the “Analyze” button and select your word document to see it’s Metadata. But here we are going to use and show you the “Scrub” function, which will remove the Metadata from your Word Document and improve your Privacy.
When you click on the “Scrub” button, you will be given the option to select your word document. You can select a single document or can select multiple documents at once. In this tutorial, I have selected a single Document. After selecting your document you will see a screen like above. In that “Scrub settings” page you have to select which data you want to remove from your document. Just select your desired Check-Boxes or you can select each and every box for maximum privacy. You can also Specify your own Author and Company name in the two fields, at the lower right corner of your main window. After selecting your options, just click the “Next” button to remove your Metadata.
Basically it is a very good utility to protect your Privacy. But the biggest drawback I have noticed that this software is not yet compatible with Word 2007 and Word 2010’s .docx format. If you are using Word 2007 or Word 2010 then first you have to save your document in .doc format and then use the software to remove the metadata. Otherwise it is a very good software and does it’s job in a straight forward way.
Author: Nirab Sarma
Nirab Sarma is the Author and the Founder of "Learn With Nirab" and he loves blogging and social networking. You can connect with Nirab on Twitter , Facebook and also on Google+