Not many people are aware of the fact that whenever they create a Microsoft Office file, whether it is an Excel, Word of even PowerPoint document, that document stores information that you might not necessarily want to have stored in the document. This is often information that you do not want to have disclosed when you send the document to someone else – it’s called metadata.
Things such as your name, company name, the name of your computer, or revisions you have made to the document might all be included in this metadata. Thankfully, there are tools that you can use in order to remove this metadata from your Office documents before you send or share them.
Here are three of the best metadata removal tools available.
1. Document Metadata Cleaner
This tool will allow you to analyze all of your Office documents in order to discover and then delete all of the potentially harmful or even embarrassing metadata that you don’t want others to see. It is a free tool for business or personal use and is able to clean one or multiple documents at the same time.
2. BEC MetaReveal
BEC MetaReveal will scrub away any metadata that you don’t want included in your documents. You can either tell the software to get rid of all metadata in your Office document or to show you what metadata is included in the document, so that you can then selectively decide what metadata you want to keep or remove. It’s great because it is linked to Microsoft Outlook and prompts you to remove your metadata as you press the send button, making it impossible for you to forget to take a look at the metadata of an Office document before you email it to someone.
3. iScrub 7 EP1
Not only does this tool clean your documents and manage your metadata, but it also allows you to convert your documents into PDF after you have cleaned them. There is no metadata that is safe from iScrub – it will find everything from past document author information, to tracked changes, deleted text and any other metadata that you want to keep hidden from whoever you are sending the document to via email or any other method of sharing your Office files.
