How to remove Microsoft Office 2010 document's hidden or personal information

If you need to share Microsoft Office documents with other people online or by some other medium such as email or USB drive, it is a good practice to remove hidden or personal information that you may want to keep private, such as your name, company, and other metadata information that the document may contain. You can find and remove this data by using Microsoft Office’s Document Inspector feature; this is what you are going to learn today, keep reading to learn more.

First create or open the Office document that you want to find and remove personal information.
Go to the File menu, click on Info, then click Check for Issues, and select Inspect Documents.

Microsoft Office 2010 - Inspect Document

3. Now in the Document Inspector window make sure that all the check-box you want to be inspected are checked, and click Inspect.

Microsoft Office 2010 - Document Inspector

4. Wait a several seconds to let the Document Inspector finish analyzing the document, then you will see an exclamation symbol next to the fields where the Document Inspector has found information; click Remove All on the fields with the data you don’t want to share, and to finish click Close.

Microsoft Office 2010 - Removing Data

Note that you cannot undo the data that has been removed after you click Remove All, so make sure that it is the data you want to delete. If you don’t know what kind of data you are deleting, you can cancel the operation, and review the properties of the document by right-clicking the document and selecting Properties and clicking the Details tab.