Documents carry who wrote them.
Word, Excel and PowerPoint save the author, the last person to edit, the company and the minutes spent editing. Remove them before the file goes outside.
Drop a photo or document here.
, paste one, or .
JPEG, PNG, HEIC, WebP, MP4, MOV, M4A, MP3, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OpenDocument and PDF
On this device. 0 network requests.
What it removes
| Person | Author, last modified by, manager, company |
|---|---|
| Time | Created and modified dates, total editing time, revision number |
| Device | Application name and version, template |
| Custom fields | Every custom property: client numbers, matter numbers, internal tags |
| Preview | The thumbnail picture of the first page |
| Photos | The camera, dates and GPS position inside JPEG and PNG photos placed in the document; the pictures themselves are not re-encoded |
| Review | Comments and the names of who wrote them; tracked changes are accepted, so deleted words leave the file |
| OpenDocument | LibreOffice files: the same fields from meta.xml, the thumbnail, the name of the printer it was last set up for, comments and tracked changes |
What it leaves alone
- Every word, cell, formula, slide and picture in the current version of the document
- Styles, layout and formatting
Some of what leaks is content, not metadata. Comments go, with their authors, and tracked changes are accepted as they stand, so deleted text leaves the file; a batch policy can keep either. Hidden sheets, rows and columns, the data behind a pivot table, hidden text, speaker notes, hidden slides, embedded files, and pictures or templates fetched from the web when the file opens are listed before you clean and left as they are, because removing them would change the document; remove them in Office. Legacy .doc, .xls and .ppt files are not read yet.
Doing it by hand
To do it in Office with Document Inspector, read remove the author and company from Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
Many files at once
Clean a folder's worth in one go on the batch page: one zip back, with a record of what was removed from each file.