Document privacy guide
How to Check a Document Before Sharing It
By Laramie Williamson ·
Most document leaks are not dramatic. They are a hidden column in a spreadsheet, a comment nobody resolved, a hyperlink to an internal server, or an author name that says more than intended. All of it is findable in under a minute if you know the order to look.
1. Properties
Start with the document properties, because they are the most likely to be wrong and the easiest to fix. You are looking for author and last-editor names, a company field, a stale title that contradicts the filename, and timestamps you would rather not publish.
2. Comments and revisions
Then look for review history: comments, sticky notes, tracked insertions and deletions, and speaker notes on slides. These are stored separately from the properties, so clearing properties does nothing to them. In a PowerPoint deck, notes are the single most commonly forgotten item — they are not visible in presentation view and they are full text.
3. Hidden content
Spreadsheets are the risk here. Hidden rows, hidden columns, hidden worksheets, filtered-out data, and cached pivot table source data are all still in the file and all still readable. A hidden sheet is a display setting, not a deletion.
Slides have their own version: a shape moved off the edge of the canvas, or a slide marked hidden, is still in the file.
- Unhide every sheet and check what is there before you decide the workbook is clean.
- Clear filters so you can see the rows a recipient could also unhide.
- Check for a pivot cache built from a wider dataset than the one you meant to share.
4. Links, 5. Embedded files, 6. Images
Hyperlinks are worth a look because they point somewhere: an internal SharePoint path, a staging URL, or a signed link that still works. Embedded and attached files ride along invisibly. And images carry two problems at once — a crop that only hides part of the picture, and, for photos, whatever metadata came with the original.
For each category, list what is there before deciding what to remove. Removing something you have not looked at is how the useful parts of a document get destroyed alongside the sensitive ones.
Doing it in one pass
The Clean tools on FreeProTool exist for exactly this checklist: each one scans a single file for images, links, email addresses, metadata, comments, and hidden content, and shows you the counts before you remove anything. There is a version per format — Clean PDF, Clean DOCX, Clean XLSX, Clean PPTX — because the storage details differ even though the checklist does not.
Everything runs in your browser, so the document you are trying to keep private is not uploaded in order to check whether it is private.
Apply this to your file
When you are ready to work on the asset, use FreeProTool to run the cleanup checklist on a file.
Tools for this task
Related guides
Find and strip the author names, edit time, company fields, and comments that a .docx carries after Save As, and understand what Word's own cleanup misses.
PDFs store two parallel sets of metadata plus annotations, form values, and attachments. Here is what is in there, and why a black box is not redaction.