Office Metadata Cleaner

What it's for

See what a Word, Excel or PowerPoint file says about the people and history behind it, and save a copy without the personal details. Office files carry the author’s and last editor’s names, the company, the folder the template came from, editing time, comments, tracked changes (deleted text included), hidden sheets and slides, speaker notes and the camera details of photos.

For example, before sending a proposal to a client, open it here to check it doesn’t still hold a colleague’s comments, last year’s figures on a hidden sheet, or the name of another client in its properties.

How to use it

Choose a file, or drop it on the page: .docx, .xlsx and .pptx and their macro and template forms. Everything worth a look is listed, worst first, then the file’s properties.

Save a clean copy downloads name-clean.docx (or .xlsx, .pptx) without the author and last-saved-by names, company, manager, template path, editing time, custom properties, thumbnail, Word’s editing session IDs and the camera details of photos, with comment and change authors renamed “Author” (as Word’s own Document Inspector does). Tick the box to clear the title, subject, tags, category and comments properties as well; the box is remembered.

Example

Make a document in Word with your name set as its author, type a sentence with Track Changes on, and open it here.

The list starts with Tracked changes: 1 insertion and 0 deletions, to accept or reject in Word, and gives your name under “Names in the properties” and “People named in comments or tracked changes”. In the clean copy, the author is gone and the change’s author is “Author”.

Good to know

The content isn’t changed: comments, tracked changes, hidden sheets and slides, speaker notes, macros and embedded files stay, and the message after saving lists what’s left to deal with in Office. Text in the document itself, such as a name in a footer, isn’t touched. LibreOffice (OpenDocument) files and older .doc, .xls and .ppt files aren’t read. The created and modified dates are kept.