Scrub your Office Docs before Publishing....
Microsoft has provided a tool to scrub your Office documents prior to publishing them. This is a great tool for people who collaborate on documents, then need to publish them for public consumption. The tool can be run from the command line to cleanse multiple documents, or from within the Office products to scrub a document you are working on.
This tool would have helped in some of the cases discussed in this article by the BBC.
You can download it at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=144e54ed-d43e-42ca-bc7b-5446d34e5360&displaylang=en
Ran across this little gem because I’m subscribed to the Microsoft Download Center RSS feed. Not a bad thing to check out and have on your aggregator.
From the offrhdreadme.htm file that is included in the install:
Types of data this add-in can remove
The following types of data are removed automatically.
- Comments.
- Previous authors and editors.
- User name.
- Personal summary information.
- Revision marks. The tool accepts all revisions specified in the document. As a result, the contents of the document will correspond to the Final Showing Markup view on the Reviewing toolbar.
- Deleted text. This data is removed automatically.
- Versions.
- VB Macros. Descriptions and comments are removed from the modules.
- The ID number used to identify your document for the purpose of merging changes back into the original document.
- Routing slips.
- E-mail headers.
- Scenario comments.
- Unique identifiers (Office 97 documents only).
Note The Remove Hidden Data tool also turns on the Remove Personal Information feature. For more information on this feature, please search for “Remove Personal Information” in the application Help.”