The Document Inspector displays several different Inspectors that help you to find and remove hidden data and personal information in Word documents before sharing.

Note that for some metadata, such as Author, you'll have to right-click on the property and choose Remove or Edit. Click the File tab again to return to your document.

Try it! Before you share your documents, especially with people outside your organization, remove any personal and confidential information stored in the document or in the document properties. Open …

The following sections describe areas where metadata may be saved in Word documents. This article describes various methods that you can use to minimize the metadata in your Word documents.

For each type of content that you want to remove from the document, select Remove All. Often Comments or Document Properties and Personal Information are removed.

Go to Insert > Header or Footer, and then select Remove Header or Remove Footer. If your document has more than one section, repeat this process for each section.

After you delete a registry key, and then you restart the program, Word runs the Setup program to correctly rebuild the registry key. If you want to rebuild the registry key before you run the program, …

Choose Remove Header or Remove Footer near the bottom of the menu. Edit or change the Header or Footer. (You’ll need to repeat steps 2-5 if you want to change both the header and the footer.)

On the File tab, select Info. Select the Check for Issues box and choose Inspect Document. Select which hidden data you'd like to check and select Inspect. Any hidden properties will be listed in the results. …

When you accept or reject the change, Word will not move to the next change in the document. Right-click the change and select the option to accept or reject it.