How to Remove Metadata from PDF and Word Files
Documents record who wrote them, their company and when they were edited. How to see and clear that metadata in PDF, Word, Excel and PowerPoint files.
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- Before you send a contract, CV, report or invoice, take a minute to remove metadata from PDF and Word files. Documents quietly record who wrote them, the company their software is registered to, the apps used and when they were last edited, and all of it travels with the file to everyone who receives it. In 2003 a UK government briefing paper on Iraq was published as a Word file whose hidden revision log named the officials who had worked on it. This guide shows what documents store and how to clean them, for free or with Acrobat and Word.
- What metadata a PDF contains
- A PDF keeps metadata in two places:
- There is a third, less obvious place. Many editors save changes by appending them to the end of the file instead of rewriting it, which is called an incremental update. Old versions of fields, and sometimes of content, can stay inside the PDF even though no reader shows them any more.
- What metadata a Word document contains
- Word, Excel and PowerPoint files (.docx, .xlsx and .pptx) are ZIP packages with a properties section that records:
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