Microsoft Office is the industry leader in the office software suites. You can use it to create, edit, print and publish all types of documents like Word documents, PDF files, Excel sheets, PowerPoint presentations and more. But when you create or edit any document in Microsoft Office, it embeds your personal information inside the document file. This feature is very useful when working in an office, as you can easily find out who has edited or created a particular document. But when you distribute these Office documents publicly, you may not want to distribute this personal information too. This is where the freeware application Metadata Cleaner can help you out. It can detect and clean the embedded metadata information from all of your Word, Excel and PowerPoint files.
You can download MetaData Cleaner from the Pointstone software website. The download is available in form of a setup installer application. After the installation, you can run it from your desktop shortcut. The application has two buttons in the main interface – Analyze and Clean. You can click on the Analyze button to analyze selected files for hidden personal information in the metadata. It displays all the metadata fields for each document analyzed, like author name, last edited by, page count, template used, application used and more. You can click on the Clean Files button to proceed to cleaning the selected elements from the metadata.
If you are not so keen on analyzing and checking what is embedded in the documents, then you can directly clean all the files of any possible metadata by clicking on the Clean button in the main interface and following the instructions. Basically, you have to select files or a folder containing your Office documents, then select the metadata fields you want to clean and click on the Next button.
Although you can clean the metadata from your Office documents manually, but you would have to go from one document to another one by one. Using the free Metadata Cleaner software you can get rid of the metadata from multiple documents at the click of a button. It is capable of cleaning the metadata from Word, PowerPoint and Excel files. I tested it on Office 2007, Office 2010 and LibreOffice 4.0 documents, but it should work with documents created by all versions of Microsoft Office, LibreOffice and OpenOffice.
You can download Metadata Cleaner from http://www.pointstone.com/products/metadata-cleaner/.