Microsoft Word, Office Watch / Documents, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word, Word-Processing /

Cleaning docs without Word

by Office Watch 16 September 2009

Doc Scrubber lets you remove hidden Word info without Word itself.

Some years ago, Microsoft ‘discovered’ the problem of ‘meta-data’, their term for the additional information in a Word document that you might not want to share with others.

The most common meta-data problem is revisions – you might not want other people to see the revisions you made to a contract during a negotiation because it can reveal more than you wish.

Other information like comments, keywords, edit time are also stored in Word documents.

Over time Microsoft has addressed this problem with tools to ‘clean’ documents before sending them out. These tools have various levels of success and ease of use.

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Word 2007 has the Document Inspector (Office Menu | Prepare | Inspect Document) to check and remove extra info from documents.

But if you’re looking for a stand-alone or multi-document tool, check out Doc Scrubber which will ‘clean’ .DOC Word files.

The newer, smaller .DOCX files also contain meta-data but you need Word 2007 to check and clean them.

Doc Scrubber is free and is stated to work on Windows 98, ME, NT and XP (no mention of Windows 7 or Vista but it probably will work).

Cleaning docs without Word

Secrets and tips for the Windows 10 May 2020 update

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