Clean a Word document before sharing DOCSCRUB

It shows you first

The order matters. A cleaner that silently strips a file teaches you nothing, and the useful part of running one is usually finding out what was in there: a comment nobody meant to leave, the name of the firm the template came from, the eleven hours somebody spent on a document billed as two.

So this lists what it found before it changes anything: the author and last editor, the company and template, the creation and modification times, the total editing time and revision count, every comment with its author, and the tracked changes including the text that was deleted.

The tracked-changes trap

The most expensive item on that list. A tracked deletion stores the deleted text in the file; that is how the feature works. Accepting all changes updates what is displayed; it does not necessarily remove the record, and a document that looks final in Word can still carry every sentence somebody took out of it, along with who took it out and when.

This is how the wrong version of a contract, a redlined offer, or a paragraph a lawyer removed on purpose reaches the other side. The document was correct on screen. The file was not.

What it does not do

• It does not change the visible text. Names in paragraphs stay in paragraphs. This removes what travels alongside the document.
• It does not touch embedded images, which keep their own EXIF including where a photograph was taken. CLOAK handles those before they go in.
• It is for .docx. For a spreadsheet's hidden sheets and pivot caches use CLEANSHEET, and SCRUB covers Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF properties in one pass.

Checking it

A .docx is a zip. Rename a copy, open it, and read docProps/core.xml and docProps/app.xml: they are short, they are plain English, and they are where the author and the editing time live. What is hidden in a Word document goes through the whole set with the reasons.