Before you share an important document with colleagues or clients, you probably take the precaution of proofreading or reviewing the contents of the document to ensure its accuracy and verify that the document does not contain anything you do not want to share with other people.

If you plan to share an electronic copy of a Microsoft Office document, you can take it one step further and review the document for hidden data or personal information that might be stored in the document itself or in the document properties.  Because this hidden information can reveal details about your organization or about the document itself you might want to remove the hidden information before you share the document with other people.

This article explains how the Document Inspector feature in Microsoft Office Word 2007, Microsoft Office Excel 2007, and Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 can help you find and remove hidden data and personal information in your Office documents.

What types of hidden data and personal information are stored in Office documents?

Several types of hidden data and personal information can be saved in an Office document. This information might not be immediately visible when you view the document, but it might be possible for other people to view or retrieve the information.

Office documents can contain the following types of hidden data and personal information:

• Comments, revision marks from tracked changes, versions, and ink annotations  If the document was a collaboration, your document might contain items such as revision marks from tracked changes, comments, ink annotations, or versions. This information can enable other people to see the names of people who worked on your document, comments from reviewers, and changes that were made to your document.

• Document properties and personal information  Document properties, also known as metadata (data that describes other data. For example, the words in a document are data; the word count is an example of metadata.), include details about your document such as author, subject, and title. Document properties also include information that is automatically maintained by Office programs, such as the name of the person who most recently saved a document and the date when a document was created. If you used specific features, your document might also contain additional kinds of personally identifiable information (PII) (Any information that can be used to identify a person, such as a name, address, e-mail address, employee ID, IP address.), such as e-mail headers, send-for-review information, routing slips, printer paths, and file path information for publishing Web pages.

• Headers, footers, and watermarks  Word documents and Excel workbooks can contain information in headers and footers. Additionally, you might have added a watermark to your Word document.

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

• Hidden rows, columns, and worksheets  In an Excel workbook, rows, columns, and entire worksheets can be hidden. If you distribute a copy of a workbook that contains hidden rows, columns, or worksheets, other people might unhide these row, columns, or worksheets and view the data that they contain.

• Invisible content  PowerPoint presentations and Excel workbooks can contain objects that are not visible because they are formatted as invisible.

• Off-slide content  PowerPoint presentations can contain objects that are not immediately visible because they were dragged off the slide into the off-slide area. This off-slide content can include text boxes, clip art, graphics, and tables.

• Presentation notes  The Notes section of a PowerPoint presentation can contain text that you might not want to share publicly, especially if the notes were written solely for the use of the person who is delivering the presentation.

• Document server properties  If your document was saved to a location on a document management server, such as a Document Workspace site or a library in SharePoint, the document might contain additional document properties or information related to this server location.