metadata removal

[Island Girl]

An attorney in our office asked me to tell him the best way to remove
metadata from a document. Although we have a "metadata washer" program on
the system (used mostly after track changes), I told him that I thought it
was better to "paste special" the document as unformatted text.

I've worried a little about that answer since then, so I thought I'd ask you
if what I told him was reasonable.

What would your answer have been?

And thanks for being there during the countless times I've needed you!

 

[Yves Dhondt]

How is the document stored? For example, if you save a document as a docx,
then Word takes the username entered in Word and stores it inside the
document.

You could try the "Inspect" functionality in Word 2007 but even that leaves
traces. The only way to be a 100% sure that your file does not contain any
metadata is to either go over its source in a simple text editor like
notepad (rename docx to zip and manually inspect all the files) or to store
it as a simple txt file.

Yves