Office 97 (yes....97!!) Word - File - Properties

[p26974]

My employer runs Office 97.

For the purposes of issuing correspondence from Word electronically, I need Word documents to be saved without the Properties including anything in the Summary or Contents tabs (ensuring anonymity, etc, for Data Protection purposes).

Can anyone advise whether there's a fix or macro which ensures that no data is populated within the Properties tab?

Thanks in anticipation.

 

[fumei]

I can't remember if 97 has Tools > Options > Security.

If it does, select the Remove personal information from this file on save check box.

Other than that, yes you can use VBA to remove things from Document Properties.



Gerry

 

[p26974]

Thanks for that Gerry

Doesn't have Security tab, I'm afraid. I've highlighted the Prompt for Doc Properties checkbox within the Save options which helps, so just need to control the content (stop) of the 'Contents' box now. Again, any help welcome!

 

[fumei]

I am a little confused. Are you trying to stop anything being put in there in the first place; or are you trying to remove what may already be there?

Gerry

 

[p26974]

Ideally, stop what's being put there in the first place.

The 'Contents' tab takes what you first type into a document, and this forms part of the 'Contents'/ For example, if a template for a letter requires that the first entry you make is 'Dear Mr Jones', then the Contents tab will contain the name of the file, followed by 'Dear Mr Jones'. Ideally, I'd want that screen to remain blank, or as a worst case scenario, contain the name of the file only.

 

[eyec]

open the Normal.dot and clear the info on it in Properties then save it.

 

[fumei]

That is a good starting point, but it does not stop anyone from going into File > Properties and putting something in.

Again, is that what you want? To prevent someone from entering anything into the property? Or just to stop the automatic ones?

Gerry

 

[p26974]

The issue is this:

We have a pre-populated letter structure which we use for all correspondence. The structure is such that the first thing typed onto the document is the salutation line (ie, Dear Mr Thomas). Due to the nature of some our customers, some of the names are recognisable to 'other readers'.

When repeat queries have come in from numerous sources, we've simply changed the date, greeting, etc on the letters and re-issued to different recipients.

However when we recently did this electronically by sending the letter as an attachment to an email, we had a query back from the recipient asking why the Properties revealed that:

a) the letter had been created before he made his query (from the Date Created field), and

b) Why the 'Title' (Properties - Summary) and Contents (Properties - Contents) held the name of a different recipient.

If there was a macro which prevented populating these fields, then we could be sure that ANY documentation we issued electronically would be information-free other than the details held on the document itself.

 

[macropod]

The real problem here seems to be that someone simply took an existing letter and edited it, instead of working from a template. That, plus you had a savvy client who thought to look at the file's properties for some reason.

It would be fairly easy to create a macro to go through a document each time it was opened or closed, to clear out any properties that you don't want to have populated. Be careful about clearing everything out though because, if you've got fields or macros in a document that rely on the contents of one of those properties, you could get all sorts of errors cropping up in the document. In that case, the cure could be worse than the disease.

Another alternative would be to insist that documents that are to be emailed to clients be converted to pdf first. Amongst other things, that generally makes them harder to edit and can be secured far more tightly against editing than any Word document can be.

Cheers

 

[p26974]

Thanks for that Macropod.

We've no concerns about the danger of recipients editing the document per se. The ironic thing with this is that the original document was in fact a template. The users are being too lazy in amending existing files, which is leading to these problems.

If we had software capable of saving to PDF, I'd recommend it! Unfortunately, we're barely out of the realms of Commodore 16s and ZX81's...!!

 

[macropod]

A bit of education (and wrist-slapping) might be in order. Shouldn't be too hard to find the culprit(s) who aren't using the templates.

There's a lot of good and cheap pdf-creation packages out there! Apart from Adobe Acrobat Distiller (not the free reader), there's:
JAWS PDF Creator,
MULP21PDF,
GhostScript,
PDF995,
RoboPDF,
FreePDF,
Serif PagePlus,
Win2PDF,
Go2PDF

Some of the computer magazines even include free pdf utilities on their cover discs ...

Cheers

 

[fumei]

If there is a business issue being caused by users not properly using templates...then there is a business issue with giving them a whack. This is what templates are for!

I know....pick up their login name, and if they do a SaveAs, have it come up with a messagebox saying..."What the ehck are you doing???"

Gerry