How to Remove or Edit Personal Properties from Microsoft Word 2007 Documents

Did you know that Microsoft Word quietly compiles information about your documents as you create them? Information such as your name, the document's title, revision numbers, and total editing time are recorded as part of the document's "properties."

While this information is often useful, there are some circumstances where you might not want these details revealed to others. Other times, the information may need to be changed or updated. Microsoft Word 2007 provides an easy way to remove all data from the document properties settings as well as for editing and updating the information.

Remove Document Properties

Why would you want to remove all of the document's properties? Privacy is one reason. You may not want your name associated with some Word documents or you may not want others to know how many revisions you made and how many hours you spent to get to the finished product. If you want to remove all document properties in Word 2007, simply go to the Office button and click on Prepare. From there, click on Inspect Document. The Document Inspector will check your document for hidden metadata and personal information. When personal data is found in the Document Properties section, click on Remove All. All document properties will be reset to blank fields.

Editing Document Properties

In some cases, it's better to edit the document's properties rather than removing them completely. In fact, document properties can be quite useful. For example, you can add keywords, titles, categories, document status information, comments, and custom information to the document's properties. This information can prove quite useful to you later as well as to your recipients.

In Microsoft Word 2007, you'll go to the Office button once again. This time, click on Prepare followed by Properties. A Document Properties bar will appear across the top of the screen of your open document. From here, you'll be able to change the fields as needed. For example, Word automatically inserts the name of the person that the Word software is licensed to in the Author field. If you're using someone else's computer, you may want to change this field to contain your name. Simply remove the incorrect entry and type your name in the field.

The Document Properties bar lists just a few of the commonly used properties. If you want to add even more detail to the document's properties, click on the down arrow that appears just next to the words "Document Properties." Choose Advanced Properties.

From here, you can add even more details including company information and custom fields such as contact information, client, completion date, department, and much more.

Viewing Document Properties

As you can see, a Word document can be quite revealing. To view a document's properties, all you need to do is go to the Office button, choose Prepare, and then choose Properties. Knowing this, now, you can view the hidden metadata of Word documents from others as well as remove or edit the hidden contents of your own documents.