Personal Information Attached to Documents

Have you ever considered that a Word document that you provide to others may contain information that you did not intend to include.

Consider these examples:

• You have written a letter in anger, and then after calming down, edited the letter to make it less volatile.  If you use the Fast Save option, the document provided to the recipient and others, may also contain the earlier venomous draft.

• If you have Track Changes enabled, then all of the changes and who made them would still be accessible in the document for someone who might want to see that information.

• If you don't want readers to know who created the document you are providing, then you should know that the authorship details are available in the document properties.  The details on when the document was created is also included in properties.

Use can turn off these features in MS Word:

Choose Options from the Tools menu, click on the Save tab, and uncheck the box labeled Allow fast saves. Now click on the Security tab and check the box titled Remove personal information from this file on save. In Word 2003, as shown in the screenshot above, the check box's title is slightly different: Remove personal information from file properties on save. When you save the file, the Author, Manager, Company, and Last saved by fields are cleared. Names in comments or edits are changed to simply Author. Any routing slip or e-mail header information is also removed. If the document contains tracked changes, you may want to accept them all before saving.

The Allow fast saves option is global and is present in Word 2000 also. The Remove personal information option is specific to the current file and is present only in Word 2002 and later. If you want that option to be the default, click on the File Locations tab in the Tools | Options dialog and note the folder containing user templates. In that folder, open the file Normal.dot. Check the Remove personal information box as noted above, then save and close the file. All new files created from this point on will have that feature enabled by default.

Source of Solution: PCMagazine, November 11, 2003

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