How to Remove Metadata from a Word Document — Inspector vs. One-Click

Word documents are chatty. A typical DOCX records the author, everyone who edited it, the company the licence belongs to, total editing time, revision count and template lineage. Send a contract or CV without cleaning it, and the recipient can read all of that in seconds.

What's stored in a Word document

• core.xml — title, author, last modified by, created/modified dates, revision number, category
• app.xml — company, manager, total editing time, word/page counts, application version
• Plus, in the body: tracked changes, comments and hidden text if you never cleaned them

Method 1: Word's built-in Document Inspector

1. File → Info → Check for Issues → Inspect Document
2. Tick Document Properties and Personal Information (plus Comments/Revisions if wanted)
3. Click Inspect, then Remove All next to each finding
4. Save — ideally as a new copy

Good: official, also handles comments and tracked changes. Bad: desktop Word only (not phones, not always Word Online), four menus deep, and it permanently deletes tracked changes — sometimes you wanted to keep those in your own copy.

Method 2: one-click, in the browser

1. Open the Word metadata remover
2. Drop the DOCX (XLSX and PPTX work too) — it shows every property first
3. Click Remove metadata & download

The author, company, revision and editing-time properties are blanked and a clean copy downloads. The document body — including any tracked changes you may want to keep — is untouched, and the file is never uploaded (it's unzipped and rezipped locally in your browser).

Which should you use?

Whatever you choose, verify: drop the cleaned file back into the metadata viewer and confirm the properties are gone. Trust, but verify — it takes four seconds.