Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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How secure is the document that you are attaching to email or routing through your local network?

Many uses never think about this issue, but the fact is that many pieces of work product contain sensitive pieces of information about the author, the company or other data that could be harmful in the wrong hands.

Information like this might include:

Your name and initials
Your company or organization name
The name of your computer
The name of the network server or hard disk drive where you saved the document
Other file properties and summary information
Non-visible portions of embedded OLE objects
The names of previous document authors
Document revisions
Document versions
Template information
Hidden text
Tracked changes and comments

(For more about the programming aspects of working with secure information in your documents, check out the MSDN page on this topic).

This information can be found in:

Metadata saved in the Document Properties. It can also include e-mail addresses, routing slips, and file path information.
Hidden text and invisible content. Rows, columns, and even entire worksheets can be hidden in Excel. Objects can also be formatted as invisible in PowerPoint presentations and Excel workbooks.
Comments, tracked changes, and annotations — items entered by reviewers can potentially be viewed by others unless stripped from a document.
Headers, footers, watermarks, off-slide content, and presentation notes. While these items are not immediately visible they frequently contain significant data. Even in PowerPoint you might have material that is outside the visible area of the slide or in the Notes panel that you might not want others to see.
Custom XML data — which may not be visible in the document itself.

The Document Inspector (in Word, Excel or PowerPoint) lets you prepare a final version of your document and make sure that it is completely stripped of any of this information that you don’t want recipients to ever see or know about.

In the past this required writing a macro, going through the document manually or using an Add-In (for 2003 his Add-In can be found at link.)

When you complete a document you probably want to remove all remaining traces of tracked changes, reviewer comments and any other irrelevant components.

While you can merge these changes or accept or reject them, the traces of the various editing features remain in the document.

There may also be saved metadata, watermarks, or other extraneous or unwanted material in a document that needs to be finalized and distributed, either within or outside of your company.

Word documents can also contain information that is formatted as hidden text. If you do not know whether your document has hidden text, you can use the Document Inspector to search for it.

Documents saved in Word 2007 can also contain custom XML data that is not visible in the document itself. The Document Inspector can find and remove this XML data.

While you can use the Final setting in the Review tab under Final Showing Markup, to make absolutely sure that there is nothing in your document you do not want distributed, you can use the Word Document Inspector.

To use the Document Inspector, click the Office Button, choose Prepare, and then select Inspect Document.

Figure 1

When the Document Inspector appears click Inspect.

Figure 2

After the document is inspected for remaining unwanted data...

Figure 3

Finally, the Document Inspector reports the Inspection Results.

Figure 4

At this point, select Remove All to further strip data from the document. After you close the Document Inspector, you can save the Inspected Document as a final version or rename it, to keep a version with the revisions if desired.

Remember that the Document Inspector is different from marking a document simply as Final.

When you mark a document as Final in the Prepare panel, it is set as read only, so that no further changes can be made or saved with the document. An inspected document could always be revised and re-saved, although that would probably mean that it should be inspected again.

In the event that you want certain information to remain with the final document — when you open the document inspector check the various categories that it will examine. Then change these inspection parameters to prevent inspection of those document properties.

Before running the Document Inspector, you might want to review some of the information before the Document Inspector clears it out.

You can check some of the metadata and other document properties that will be stripped by the document inspector if you click the Office Button, click Prepare, and select Properties. You also revise certain document properties like author, title and key words.

These are steps that as an IT administrator you may want to make part of your regular procedures, or as a user in a smaller setting you may want to implement individually.

In many ways the Document Inspector is helpful by calling attention to areas that many users may have ignored but in this day of heightened security and identity theft, it’s a good idea to implement these minimal standards of data protection.

InformIT Articles and Sample Chapters

Introduction to Office 2007

Getting Adjusted to Office 2007 Changes

Books and eBooks

Microsoft Office 2007: Visual QuickStart Guide (Read in Safari Books Online)

Microsoft Office System Inside Out (Safari)

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