Word documents without names

[Jan Heisterberg]

How do I ensure, that no author names appear anywhere in a
Word document ?
Looking at File-Properties and selecting Statistics, I see
a field called "Last Saved By".
In the same way, using Track Changes will retain names of
editors. But will they go completely away when changes are
accepted - with no trace at all ?

I want my final Word document to have NO trace of any
author or editor - except perhaps the very last.

Consider a political document, e.g. a press relase. It is
very unlikely, that the names of all the contributors to
the final, released version, should be traceable through
the document.

How do I ensure this ?

 

[Jezebel]

There are utilities around that do this, and a knowledge-base article on the
MS site. But for the purposes you mention, creating a PDF is a better way to
distribute the document anyway: more secure, more reliable format, and you
avoid the problems you're concerned with.

In any case, sending out press releases as Word documents is a seriously bad
idea. Not all media organisations use Word, and a lot of organisations block
Word documents from external emails.

 

[Jay Freedman]

Hi, Terre,

Don't be too impressed by the perception of security afforded by a PDF
file. That same scanner, with OCR software (probably included in the
software bundle that came with the scanner), can turn the PDF back
into an editable document. If someone is determined to spoof your
documents -- as might happen in business or politics -- it's
frighteningly easy to do.

 

[Guest]

Thank you all for the suggestions.

-----Original Message-----
Hi, Terre,

Don't be too impressed by the perception of security afforded by a PDF
file. That same scanner, with OCR software (probably included in the
software bundle that came with the scanner), can turn the PDF back
into an editable document. If someone is determined to spoof your
documents -- as might happen in business or politics -- it's
frighteningly easy to do.

saved by" and that kind of thing are saved on what are
call meta tags. Jezebel is right, there are programs that
will delete those from your documents, but I agree whole
heartedly about sending out your documents as PDF
documents. If you send a document in a word processing
format, it can be changed by anyone who has access to it,
or they can copy it and use it for their own purposes. We
don't have Adobe Acrobat, but instead use our
copier/scanner to scan a document as a PDF document and
then email it to our clients. Adobe Acrobat is not that
expensive when you consider the security it will give you
in documents to be distributed.

 

[Guest]

The answer is found in: Microsoft Knowledge Base Article
834427: "Remove Hidden Data"