Are You Sending More Than Intended With Microsoft Office Documents: Remove Hidden Data

Are you sending private data with every office document you post to a website or email out as an attachment? If you aren’t taking the necessary precautions you are.

There are two ways that you may be leaving unnecessary and perhaps private information in your office documents. First, every office document that you create may keep track of items such as title, author’s name, company, comments, and the name of the network server or hard drive on which the document is saved. In addition the document tracks when it was created, accessed, printed, last saved, number of revisions, and total editing time.

The second method of leaving unnecessary information is through the track changes option. With Track Changes enabled, Microsoft Office keeps a record of who made what changes and when. Unless you accept or reject all of the changes in a document, this information will remain available for others to see. You can visit the following website for examples of businesses and government organizations that have made this mistake: http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/trackchanges/PublicExamplesOfTrackChanges.html

So how do you make sure that you don’t make the same mistake? There are a few things you can do to protect yourself and your documents. First you can be sure to accept or reject all changes in a document prior to sending it on as a finished product. Microsoft.com has an article called “Get rid of tracked changes and comments, once and for all” that will explain how to do this. It can be found at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA010983881033.aspx

Second you can go to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/834427 and download the Remove Hidden Data tool that Microsoft has created. Be sure to read the instructions and understand which type of information will be removed.

Lastly you can turn your documents into PDFs prior to sending. Be careful though, sometimes your track changes can also be sent with a PDF file. This can happen if 1) you leave the tracked changes visible in the document prior to converting it and 2) if you have your printer set up to print “tracked changes” along with the document. When using this option just preview the PDF file prior to sending to see if any unwanted information has been included.

–Carrie Albin, Outreach Coordinator and Co-Editor

This entry was posted on Friday, March 10th, 2006 at 7:49 pm and is filed under T3 Technology Tips and Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.