How to Remove Metadata from Word Documents (Windows & Mac)

A .docx is a ZIP archive. Rename one to .zip, open it, and the metadata is sitting in plain XML files you can read without Word — which is also how you check that a removal worked.

• docProps/core.xml — the fields Word calls document properties. dc:creator is the author, taken from whatever name was typed into Office when it was installed. cp:lastModifiedBy is whoever saved it last, which on a document that has been passed around is a list of people who touched it. Alongside those: dcterms:created, dcterms:modified, cp:revision (how many times it has been saved), and the title, subject, and keywords.
• docProps/app.xml — the fields Word fills in without asking. Company and Manager come from the Office install or the template. TotalTime is the accumulated editing time in minutes, which quietly reports whether a document took four hours or four minutes. Template names the template it was built from — often a company letterhead, on a document you meant to look independent. Application and AppVersion identify your Office build.
• word/settings.xml — among the settings, a list of w:rsid values. Revision save IDs are random identifiers Word generates per editing session and attaches to the text typed during it, so it can tell which run of edits produced which paragraph when merging. Two documents that share rsids were edited in the same session, which links them to each other regardless of what the author fields say.
• word/document.xmland its neighbours — comments, tracked changes, and anyone's name attached to them. Deleted text that is still tracked is not deleted; it is marked as deleted and stored.
• word/media/ — every image you inserted, stored as its own file. Word does not strip these on the way in, so a photo you dragged in from your phone can still hold its GPS coordinates, camera serial number, and capture time. This is the one nothing in Word cleans.

None of this is hidden in a technical sense. It is a ZIP file and the fields are readable text — the only thing standing between a recipient and your company name is that they did not think to look.

The Document Inspector ships with Word for Windows — 2016, 2019, 2021, and Microsoft 365 all have it in the same place. It scans for about a dozen categories of hidden content and offers to remove each one.

1. Save a copy first.The Inspector's removals are not reliably undoable, and some of them delete document content rather than metadata. Work on a duplicate and keep the original.
2. Open File → Info. The Info pane already lists some of what you are about to remove — Author, Last Modified By, and Total Editing Time appear on the right.
3. Click Check for Issues → Inspect Document. If the document has unsaved changes, Word asks you to save before it will run.
4. Leave the checkboxes alone and click Inspect. Everything is ticked by default. Unticking a category only means the Inspector will not look for it.
5. Read the results before clicking anything labelled Remove All. A red exclamation mark means the category was found. Each one has its own Remove All button; there is no single button that does all of them, and that is deliberate.
6. Remove All on "Document Properties and Personal Information". This is the one you came for: author, last saved by, company, manager, template name, and the accumulated editing time.
7. Save. The removal is applied to the file on disk when you save, not when you click the button.

What the other categories mean

Run the Inspector a second time after saving. It should come back clean for the categories you removed — and if it does not, you removed the finding but not the saved file.

Without opening Word at all

Right-click the .docx in File Explorer → Properties → Details → Remove Properties and Personal Information → Create a copy with all possible properties removed. Windows writes a cleaned duplicate beside the original. It only knows the fields listed in the Details pane, so comments, tracked changes, rsids, and image EXIF all survive it — but for a file you cannot open, or a folder of them selected at once, it is faster than nothing. Our Windows metadata removal guide covers that dialog in detail, including what it leaves behind on photos.

Word for Mac has no Document Inspector and no Check for Issues menu — the File menu on macOS has no Info pane for them to live in. Every guide that tells you to click those on a Mac was written from the Windows screenshots. What you have instead is one checkbox and some manual work.

The privacy checkbox

1. Open the Review tab → Protect → Protect Document. (On older Mac builds the same setting sits under Word → Preferences → Security.)
2. Under Privacy, tick Remove personal information from this file on save.
3. Click OK, then save. The stripping happens on save, so nothing changes until you do.

This writes a flag into the document's settings telling Word to clear the author and last-saved-by fields and to anonymise the names on comments and tracked changes each time it is saved. It is per-document, not a global preference — you set it again on the next file. It does not remove the comments themselves.

Editing the fields directly

File → Properties opens the same summary Windows shows in the Info pane — Title, Author, Company, Manager, Keywords, Comments — and lets you blank each one by hand. The Statistics tab is where you will find the editing time and revision count that the Windows Inspector removes and this dialog does not.

The rest, by hand

• Comments: Review → the arrow beside Delete → Delete All Comments in Document.
• Tracked changes: Review → Accept → Accept All Changes and Stop Tracking. Leaving tracking on means your next edit starts the record again.
• Hidden text:turn on the paragraph marks button (¶) to see it — hidden text shows with a dotted underline — then select and delete.

Reading the file to check

With no Inspector to re-run, the check is the ZIP. In Terminal:

# Read the properties without unpacking anything
unzip -p report.docx docProps/core.xml
unzip -p report.docx docProps/app.xml

# List the images the document carries
unzip -l report.docx | grep word/media

A cleaned document's core.xml has an empty dc:creator and cp:lastModifiedBy. If your name is still printed there, the save did not apply the setting. macOS handles photo metadata no better — removing EXIF data on a Mac covers the images themselves.

No — not by default. Word's PDF export copies the document properties across into the new file, so the author name you wanted gone reappears in the PDF's own metadata. Exporting changes the format, not the facts.

On Windows, the switch is in the export dialog: File → Save As → pick PDF → Options…, then untick Document propertiesunder "Include non-printing information". Same dialog, same trip — it is just not on by default in the direction you want.

What the export genuinely does help with is the tracked-changes problem, since the PDF holds rendered pages rather than an edit history. But that is only true if you exported the document without markup; export it showing markup and every comment is printed onto the page, where no metadata tool will ever find it because by then it is content.

And the PDF arrives with metadata of its own — a Creator naming Word, a Producer naming the export engine, timestamps. Removing metadata from a PDF covers cleaning that, including the reason a stripped PDF usually still has the old values sitting in the file.