removing hidden names and identifiers from docs

[bookouri]

We want to distribute power point presentations and some word documents through the company web site, but I have been asked about removing hidden names and identifiers from office documents so we dont distribute employee names, computer names or any other information. In Office97 microsoft tagged documents with this hidden information. Do later versions of Office still do this, and if they do, how can I "clean" up documents before releasing them to the public?

any suggestions would be appreciated...

 

[cheerio]

Powerpoint presentations can be saved as web pages so you get pure HTML which you can inpect.

For Word, if I want to save as a document I would save as an RTF file which is pure text and formatting without other things such as document history or macros. However, Word also has a save as HTML option.

Finally, you can remove most history by copying and pasting into a new document.

 

[bookouri]

Thanks, I've been researching this for a couple of hours now. I looked at microsoft's "recommendations" and I can not imagine being able to get a few dozen people to make sure that all their settings are left in the "recommended" setting, and from reading microsoft's stuff, Im not entirely sure that even with all the settings correct, "something" wouldnt be missed" anyway their recommendations are WAY to complicated to be much good. Anything that complicated is never going to be reliable. I also checked a couple of demo software packages that claimed to "clean" office stuff, but the two demos I tried would not even install and function. I've also seen a lot of stuff about problems even "big" companies have experiences due to this problem. There just about has to be some "cleaner" software out there that someone could use to "clean" every document before it is released.

But Ill try the powerpoint and word documents saving to html, but I know they're going to insist on being able to distribute plain old power point documents.

thanks for the response...

 

[substitute]

Look at Woody's Office Watch,

http://www.woodyswatch.com/office

which has an extensive discussion on this subject as regards Word documents (look at issue 8.27). Woody hasn't come up with a universal cleaner and I suspect there isn't one. If your organisation is concerned about this sort of thing it shouldn't let Office documents out into the wild.

The UK government and even Microsoft have been badly bitten and no longer release native Word documents.

 

[bookouri]

thanks, yes I noticed several of the articles I found were related to problems the Brits had experienced. Without a cleaner, Ive pretty much reconciled to converting word documents to "something", but the really big problem I think is going to be powerpoint files. I wonder if some of the office substitutes, Star Office etc.. provide a presentation product that can read and save powerpoint files?

thanks for the reply..

 

[roban]

There is a program that does this. I used to have it but don't know where it is. I will try to find this and post about it.

if it weren't for flashbacks I'd have no memory at all

 

[bookouri]

thanks, if you can find that program let me know what/where etc. Ive tried a couple I found, but neither of them worked.

 

[IFRs]

Does converting to pdf do what you need?

 

[bookouri]

I can do that with the .DOC files, but the powerpoint files are still the hangup.. Like someone stated earlier I could save them as html files, but that just wouldnt be as &quot;neat&quot; to the people who just love to distribute those neat little powerpoint presentations...<G>

 

[roban]

Program to remove tags in Office 97 here:

h**p://

http://www.wugnet.com/tips/display.asp?ID=112

This will stop future docs from saving personal info.
Tools/Options/Security Tab/Remove Personal Information from file properties on save.

More info here.............h**p://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=

http://support.microsoft.com:80/support/kb/articles/Q223/7/90.ASP&NoWebContent=1

if it weren't for flashbacks I'd have no memory at all

 

[substitute]

I've just looked through a number of powerpoint files using a hex dump utility and I don't think you need to worry about personal information Microsoft slip in. Apart from things you put in yourself (presentation content and document properties) there is none of the contentious stuff MS put in a Word document.

BUT

I once had an embarrassing problem with a PPT I published on the office Intranet. Try the following exercise:

Create a spreadsheet with a small table of salaries on one sheet and a table of bonus payments on another. Total the bonus payments. Select the total, copy it and then paste it into a slide in a Powerpoint presentation. Select the option to paste the entire workbook. Save the presentation and re-open it.

The presentation now a slide showing the total bonus paid to employees (What a great company this is - sharing so much of its profits with its employees!)

If you double click the total you get a little Excel window. From there you can scroll anywhere in the workbook and find, for example, your boss's salary. (What a dumb company this is, sharing so much of its confidential salary data with its employees)

This is the REAL reason you need to take care when passing PPT files around. Most options for pasting data from an Ofice document into a Powerpoint presentation carry some proportion of the same risk.

Once I recognised the above problem no-one was alowed to let PPT files get into the wild unless they had been carefully cleared for publication. This usually included removing Office data and repasting it as Unformatted Text or (for charts) as Picture. This means you have to re-do the presentation each time the data changes, but at least you only release the data you planned to release.

Good luck!

 

[bookouri]

thanks, you make a good point, worrying the &quot;hidden&quot; stuff is pretty irrelevant if you let the actual content get out of hand..and in these days of cut and paste anything, it doesnt take much...