Microsoft Office documents may contain hidden data, such as personal information and confidential data, which are not visible in the document but retrievable by others. The specific types of hidden data that can be found in an Office document include:

• Comments, revision marks from tracked changes, versions, and ink annotations
• Document properties and personal information
• Headers, footers and watermarks
• Hidden text
• Hidden rows, columns, and worksheets
• Invisible content
• Off slide content
• Presentation notes
• Document server properties

Much of the information in the above list is not necessarily information you want to share with others and could even pose as a security threat to your organization by doing so. Therefore, before sharing an electronic copy of your document, you should remove any hidden data. You can accomplish this using the Document Inspector tool. The steps below outline how to use the tool in Microsoft Word 2007.

To use the Document Inspector in Word 2007:

1. Open the Word document that you want to inspect.
2. Click the Microsoft Office Button, click Save As, and then type a name in the File name box to save a copy of your original document.
3. Return to the original copy of the document, click the Microsoft Office Button, point to Prepare, and then click Inspect Document.
4. In the Document Inspector dialog box, select the check boxes to choose the types of hidden content that you want to be inspected.
5. Click Inspect.
6. Review the results of the inspection in the Document Inspector dialog box.
7. Click Remove All next to the inspection results for the types of hidden content that you want to remove from your document.

Now you can safely share an electronic copy of your document without sharing personal and confidential data at the same time.

[rsslist:http://shop.tagjag.com/products/microsoft+office]