How To Remove Personal Information From Your Word Documents

Table of Contents

Introduction

It’s good practice to remove personal information from MS Word files.

Did you know that MS Word records a lot of information about you, and even about your computer and the network you’re working on, and then saves them with the text document you are creating?

If you are using MS Word as your main word processor, you may be providing a lot more personal information to your readers than you intended to.

Some of the information you inadvertently provide can be not only just “unfortunate” or “undesirable” but it could have legal consequences as well if it’s a Word document, let’s say, provided to the opposing counsel in a court setting.
It is strongly advisable to clean your MS Word documents from all such personal information unless you really want to include them for one specific reason or another.

Your Personal Info Saved in MS Word

CAUTION: According to Microsoft, MS Word stores a wide variety of personal information with a document including the following:

• Your name

• Your initials

• Your company or organization name

• The name of your computer

• The name of the network server or hard disk where you saved the document

• Other file properties and summary information

• Non-visible portions of embedded OLE objects

• Document revisions

• Document versions

• Template information

• Hidden text

• Comments

And there is no method to remove all such information in a single move.

How to Remove Personal Info

Moreover, different versions of MS Word have slightly different ways of removal.

However, here is a basic way to make sure your personal information will not be saved with the File Properties fields of your document:

Select Tools > Options from your main menu.
Select the Security tab.
Select “Remove personal information from file properties on save” check box and click OK.

For Word 365

Click File.

Click Info to display the Info controls.

Select Check for Issues > Inspect Document under INSPECT DOCUMENT:

In the Document Inspector screen, select the content options you want and click Inspect. Make sure you select the “Document Properties and Personal Information” option.