Following our recent seminar on Metadata, several attendees asked about metadata removal in Word for the Mac 2011. Here’s how:
On the Word menu, click Preferences.
- Under Personal Settings, click Security.
- Under Privacy options, select the Remove personal information from this file on save check box.
- Save the document.
- In document properties, the properties Author, Manager, and Company on the Summary tab, and Last saved by on the Statistics tab.
- All names associated with comments or tracked changes are changed to “Author.”
- If you add or edit your name in a specific comment or elsewhere in your file, that information is not removed by this procedure. You must remove that information manually.
To specify the personal information that appears in Office documents, Office:Mac has this advice:
To help maintain the level of privacy that you want, you can edit or remove any of the author and contact information that is associated with Office documents. The author and contact information that you specify automatically appears in all your Office documents, including those that you share with other people, unless you remove your personal information from a document.
- On the Word menu, click Preferences.
- Under Personal Settings, click User Information .
- Make the changes that you want.
When you update the information in one Office application, the information is automatically updated for all Office applications.
A cautionary note: the metadata removal in Word for the Mac does not appear to be as thorough as Prepare > Inspect Document in the Windows version. Users would be best served by converting their documents to Acrobat and using Acrobat’s Examine or Sanitize Document features.
Oregon Law Practice Management 
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Nice advice for removing personal information from a Word for Mac document. Once again, Microsoft seems to “penalize” Mac users by leaving out the “Prepare > Inspect Document” in the Windows version (even including Word 2010). Converting a document to PDF in Acrobat is not really a workable solution for attorneys who negotiate document terms in a reasonably cooperative manner. Although Acrobat allows for annotation, exchanging PDF files between attorneys is a bit like going back to sending hard documents in the mail or by fax, and having an assistant manually “redline” the document, etc.
MetaClean edit/remove metadata from pdf, microsoft office and openoffice documents.
Free download from http://www.adarsus.com
Another option – thanks! Looks like the best link for more information is: http://www.adarsus.com/en/metaclean.html.
I tried this and it worked great; I even decided to buy a license (it was only about $15). Unfortunately, when I tried a .doc file (as opposed to .docx) it did not work. Maybe it was just that file though, so I’ll do some investigating and see.
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Thank you Vivian! Much appreciated 🙂
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