Word metadata stripping

Here’s a small and possibly useful tip.

As we all know by know, Word/Excel etc save a lot of metadata about you when you draft a document, and sometimes you don’t want to pass that m/d on. The safest and easiest thing is to save the document (via the excellent PDF Factory) as a pdf document and then email it to its intended recipient.

However, sometimes you just want to send in editable format, without doing the pdf dance, so here’s how:

In Word, go Tools|Options and then click the Security tab, and then click on the box marked “Remove personal information from this file on save“.

I don’t know how much protection it gives you, but it’s probably better than nothing if you need it.

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Alt. 1 – you could just write the thing in a plain old text editor, or email program

Alt. 2 – you could still write in Word but save as an RTF (rich text format) document, which I think strips out code, too.