Removing Personal Information and Hidden Data

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One easy security measure you can take when sharing documents with others is to remove information you don't intend others to see. For example, you can remove personal information so that people who view your document won't be able to see the names of reviewers, the author of the document, and so forth. If your document contains other hidden information, such as version information or changes recorded by Word's fast save option, you'll want to eliminate that information as well. If you don't delete hidden information, other people who view your document might see information you'd rather they didn't, especially if they save your Word document in another file format (because information hidden in a Word document doesn't remain hidden when a Word document is saved in another format and viewed in another application). In the next few sections, we'll take a more detailed look at ways in which you can clear unnecessary personal information from documents before you share the documents with others.

Note

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In addition to removing personal information, removing version information, and removing fast save data, you should remove hidden text and accept or reject any tracked changes before you pass your document on to others. For more information about working with hidden text, see Chapter 5, "Adding Panache with Text Formatting and Special Characters," and for more information about accepting and rejecting tracked changes, see Chapter 33, "Revising Documents Using Markup Tools."

Removing Personal Information

Before you pass a document to others, you might want to remove hidden and personal information from the document. In Word, you can easily remove the following types of personal information:

• File properties, such as author name, manager name, company name, and last saved by information.
• Names associated with comments. (Word can change reviewers' names to Author automatically.)
• Routing slips.
• E-mail message header generated when you click the E-Mail button.
• Names associated with versions. (Word can change names associated with versions to Author automatically.)

To hide these informational tidbits, you must configure the Security tab in the Options dialog box as follows:

1. With your file open, choose Tools, Options, and click the Security tab.
2. Select the Remove Personal Information From This File On Save check box, and then click OK.
3. Save the document.

Keep in mind that when you use this option, the names associated with information are deleted, but the actual information remains. For example, setting this option changes all names associated with comments to Author, but the comments remain intact. The same holds true for versions—the name of the person who saved a version is changed to Author, but the version of the document remains available for display.

Sending Documents Without Version Information

If you use the Versions feature in Word when you work with documents, the versions are saved as hidden information in the document. This enables you to retrieve the information later. When you send a document that contains versions to others, they can open past versions just as you open versions. In addition, versions of a document do not remain hidden if you or someone else saves the document in another format. To avoid sending extraneous information to others, you might want to remove the version information in documents before you pass the document along. You can do so in two ways:

• Distribute a separate document. If you want to keep the previous versions of a document but you also need to pass the document on to others, you can save the current version as a separate document and then distribute the separate document instead of the document containing the versions. In this way, you create a "clean" document that doesn't include any version information. To do this, create a version to incorporate the latest changes (if necessary), and then choose File, Versions to open the Versions dialog box. Select the version of the document you want to save, and click Open. Then choose File, Save As to save this version as a new document.
• Delete all version information. If you don't need to retain information from prior versions, you can delete the version information stored in your document before you send the document to others. To do so, choose File, Versions to open the Versions dialog box, select the version(s) you want to remove (press Ctrl to select multiple versions), and click Delete.

After you remove versions from documents or create a clean copy of a document, you won't have to worry about others seeing version information if they open the document in an application other than Word. For more information about working with versions of documents, see Chapter 33, "Revising Documents Using Markup Tools."

Removing Fast Save Information

Another type of hidden information your Word documents might contain is information stored from fast saves. If you save a document with the Allow Fast Saves check box selected and then open the document as a text file, the document might contain information that you've deleted. This happens because fast saves save changes to a document instead of saving the entire document. To avoid this problem, before you share a document with someone else, you should fully save your document. To do so, follow these steps:

1. Open your document, choose Tools, Options, and click the Save tab in the Options dialog box.
2. Clear the Allow Fast Saves check box, and click OK.
3. Click the Save button on the Standard toolbar to save your document.

An added bonus of this procedure is that when you turn off the fast save option and perform a full save, you usually reduce your document's file size because you're no longer saving all the changes made to your document along with the document's contents.