Section 18.4. Removing Personal Information

18.4. Removing Personal Information

Word embeds your name in the documents you create, and there's a good chance that it collects other information as you work. To see some of this collected information, choose Office button Prepare Properties to open the Document Properties pane above your document. At the very least, you see your name in the Author box. From the Document Properties drop-down menu (in the upper-left corner), choose Advanced Properties to show the full document properties box shown in Figure 18-16.

Figure 18-16. The Document Properties box stores information about you and your document. For example, the Statistics tab keeps track of the number of words and paragraphs. It also keeps track of information you may consider more personal, like total editing time and the number of revisions.

When you turn on Track Changes or enter comments in a document, Word saves even more information in the document file. When you're ready to distribute your document, you may want to remove all personal information. You can run the Document Inspector (a new Word 2007 feature) to get a full report on the details that are included in your document. Choose Office Prepare Inspect Document to open the Document Inspector box. You can have Word check for several categories of information:

• Comments, Revisions, Versions, and Annotations

• Document Properties and Personal Information

• Custom XML Data

• Headers, Footers and Watermarks

• Hidden Text

To find personal information, make sure the Document Properties and Personal Information option is selected, and then click the Inspect button in the lower-right corner. After your computer makes a thorough study of your document, it reports back with a box that looks like Figure 18-17. For each type of item the Document Inspector found (comments, document properties, and so on), you see a brief message and a Remove All button. So, for example, to remove the document properties and personal information from your document, click the Remove All button next to that line.

Figure 18-17. After you run the Document Inspector, you see this box. The circle with the checkmark (as shown next to Comments, Revisions, Versions, and Annotations) indicates that the inspector didn't turn up any of these items. However, the exclamation point next to Document Properties and Personal Information shows that this information is still embedded in the document file.