Microsoft Office 2003 ReadMe File: Remove Hidden Data add-in

© 2003 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

This document provides late-breaking information about the Microsoft^® Office 2003 Remove Hidden Data add-in. The Contents section lists all of the information contained in this file; for late breaking information specific to an individual Office system product, see the Readme file for that product.

Remove Hidden Data is an add-in for Microsoft Office 2003 Editions or Microsoft Office XP that lets users permanently remove hidden data and collaboration data from their Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint^® files.

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Contents

Overview

System requirements

Types of data this add-in can remove

Overview

When you distribute an Office document electronically, the document might contain information that you do not want to share publicly, such as information that you’ve designated as “hidden,” or information that allows you to collaborate on writing and editing the document with others.

The Remove Hidden Data add-in is a tool that you can use to remove personal or hidden data that might not be immediately apparent when you view the document in the Microsoft Office application.

You can run the Remove Hidden Data add-in on individual files from within the Office XP or Office System 2003 application. Or, you can run Remove Hidden Data on multiple files at once from the command line. In either case, you must have the application in which the document was created, installed, to run the tool.

Notes

You should run the Remove Hidden Data add-in on files when you are ready to publish them. This is because some of the data that the tool removes is used by Office for collaboration features, such as Track Changes, Comments, and Send for Review.
The Remove Hidden Data add-in is designed to permanently remove certain types of data from Office files. By default, the add-in will save to a new file name.
You should always save to a new file name, rather than overwrite the original file with the new document, in order to preserve a copy of the document containing the original data.
To change the language that the Remove Hidden Data add-in uses, you will need to download a new copy of the Remove Hidden Data add-in for that language. After the proper language add-in has been installed, you can access it by changing the UI language in the Microsoft 2003 Language Settings tool. Note that the command-line tool does not support Office language settings. However, all copies of the Remove Hidden Data add-in, in any language, include an English-language version, to support the command-line tool.

This tool cannot remove hidden data from the following types of files:

Documents using rights-management permissions
Protected documents
Digitally signed documents
Mail merge/print merge documents
Shared workbooks

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System requirements

Supported Operating Systems: Microsoft Windows^® XP
This download works with the following Office applications:
- Microsoft Office Word 2003
- Microsoft Office Excel 2003
- Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003
- Microsoft Word 2002
- Microsoft Excel 2002
- Microsoft PowerPoint 2002

You must have the application in which the document was created installed to run the add-in. Also, the version of Office that you have must be the same or newer than the version of the document on which you want to run the Remove Hidden Data tool. For example, you can run the tool on an Office 2000 document using Office 2003, but you cannot run the tool on an Office 2003 document using Office 2000.

Remove Hidden Data works with Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, and Web pages, single-file Web pages, and XML documents created by Word, Excel and PowerPoint. It does not work with other document formats.

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Types of data this add-in can remove

All data removed by the application’s Remove Personal Information feature. For more information on this feature, please search for “Remove Personal Information” in the application Help. This data is removed automatically.
Comments. This data is removed automatically.
Previous authors and editors. This data is removed automatically.
User name. This data is removed automatically.
Personal summary information. This data is removed automatically.
Headers and footers. Except in command-line mode, you will be prompted when this data is found. By default, this data is left in place.
Revision marks. This data is removed automatically.
Deleted text. This data is removed automatically.
Hidden text. Except in command-line mode, you will be prompted when this data is found. By default, this data is removed.
Hidden rows/columns. Except in command-line mode, you will be prompted when this data is found. By default, this data is removed.
Pivot tables. Except in command-line mode, you will be prompted when this data is found. By default, some data will be removed from the pivot table.
Hyperlinks. Except in command-line mode, you will be prompted when this data is found. By default, this data is left in place.
Versions. This data is removed automatically.
Field codes. Except in command-line mode, you will be prompted when this data is found. By default, the field codes will be resolved and left in place.
Template name. This data is removed automatically.
VB Modules. Except in command-line mode, you will be prompted when this data is found. By default, this data is left in place.
File paths. Except in command-line mode, you will be prompted when this data is found. By default, this data is left in place.
Embedded objects. Except in command-line mode, you will be prompted when this data is found. By default, embedded objects that are Office documents will be removed, while other embedded objects will be left in place.
Note For those embedded objects that are removed, the picture representing the embedded object visually remains in the document, but all the other data related to it is removed.
Hidden worksheets. Except in command-line mode, you will be prompted when this data is found. By default, this data is removed.
Custom views. Except in command-line mode, you will be prompted when this data is found. By default, this data is left in place.
SmartTags. These are turned off, but the appropriate text is left in place.
Links to external data sources. Except in command-line mode, you will be prompted when this data is found. By default, this data is removed.
Custom properties. Except in command-line mode, you will be prompted when this data is found. By default, this data is removed.
The ID number used to identify your document for the purpose of merging changes back into the original document. This data is removed automatically.
Printer paths (except as noted in Known issues). This data is removed automatically.
Routing slips. This data is removed automatically.
E-mail headers. This data is removed automatically.
Scenario comments. This data is removed automatically.
PowerPoint presentation notes. Except in command-line mode, you will be prompted when this data is found. By default, this data is removed.
PowerPoint off-slide content. By default, this data is left in place.
Unique identifiers (Office 97 documents only). This data is removed automatically.

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Known issues

Excel: In Excel 2002, printer paths are not removed; however, they are removed in Excel 2003.
Excel: The link to a supporting external workbook may not be cleaned from an Excel single-file Web page.
Excel: In an Excel workbook that includes a list and one or more custom views, the custom views will not be removed.
Word and Excel: If multiple objects are layered on top of each other, the objects hidden below the top object may not be made visible to the user.
PowerPoint: Same color text will not be removed in all scenarios.
If a file previously contained a VBA macro, certain traces of the VBA macro cannot be removed by the tool.
If the Remove Hidden Data add-in shuts down unexpectedly, a log file may be left in your temporary directory. To remove this log file, delete the contents of the temporary directory in your local settings folder.
If you close the Remove Hidden Data add-in before it is finished reviewing the document, one or more temporary files may be left in the destination directory. To remove these files, delete them from the destination directory.
Single-file Web pages that have been reviewed by this tool may contain the name of a randomly generated temporary file in the form file:///c:/<number>/. The number used in this name is based on the file name of the single-file web page and cannot be traced back to your computer.
PowerPoint: Unlike other Office programs that support SmartTags. SmartTags are not turned off and the appropriate text is left in place.

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Basic use

After you install the Remove Hidden Data add-in, open the document you want to review, then, on the File menu, click Remove Hidden Data.

Note If you do not see the Remove Hidden Data command on the File menu, check the following:

On the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the Security tab.
Under Macro Security, click Macro Security.
Click the Trusted Publishers tab.
Select the Trust all installed add-ins and templates check box, and then click OK twice.

A series of dialogs will step you through the process of removing hidden data from your document. You can choose to be prompted to evaluate hidden information before it is removed from your document, or you can choose to run the tool automatically, without prompting. See Types of data this add-in can remove for more information.

Notes

You should always save to a new file name, rather than overwrite the original file with the new document, in order to preserve a copy of the document containing the original data.
The Remove Hidden Data add-in does not support saving documents as templates.

After you have specified a filename, the add-in will begin reviewing the document. If you selected the option to be prompted, when the add-in finds hidden data, you will be asked whether you want to keep or remove the data.

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Command line

To run the Remove Hidden Data add-in from the command-line, do the following:

Please close all instances of Excel, Word, Outlook, and PowerPoint before launching the command-line tool.
On the Start menu, click Run.
Type "cmd" (without the quotes), and then press ENTER.
Switch to the directory that contains the OFFRHD.EXE file. By default, this is the directory where you installed the Remove Hidden Data add-in.
At the command prompt, type the syntax for the task you want to perform.

Notes

Although your document application is not visible, it is running in the background. If the application launches a dialog box, the Remove Hidden Data add-in will pause until the dialog box is closed. If the dialog box remains open beyond 120 seconds, the application will terminate and the Remove Hidden Data add-in will proceed to the next file, or close if it has reached the last file.
You can type either a slash (/) or a dash (-) as a flag to precede parameters. Flags are not case-sensitive.
If you type in multiple flags, only the first one will be recognized.
You must enter the /source parameter first, optionally followed by the /destination parameter. All other parameters can be in any order.

The syntax for OFFRHD.EXE is as follows:

OFFRHD [/?] source [destination] [/O] [/N:A] [/R] [/F:filetype] [/L: logfile] [/A] [/M]

Parameter	Description
source	Required. Specifies the drive, directory, and files for which you want to remove personal information. Can be any valid, full qualified path name.
destination	Optional. Specifies a location for scanned files. If you do not specify this field, all files will be saved in the same directory with a suffix representing the current date. For example, -C010503 would represent January 5, 2003. If the destination file already exists, it will be overwritten.
/O	Specifies that no prompt will display to confirm that you want to overwrite an existing file.
/N:A	Specifies that the tool will remove all potential hidden data regardless of pre-set defaults. WARNING: Use of the /N:A feature may cause some content to be lost from the document.
/R	Specifies that contents of the source directory and its subdirectories will be examined.
/F:filetype	Specify format for destination files.
/F:H	Specifies HTML.
/F:M	Specifies MHTML.
/F:B	Specifies binary document format. If you do not specify this parameter, the default will be to save in the same format as the source file.
/L: logfile	Specifies a location to stores the log file. If you do not specify this, the log will display when the tool is finished.
/A	Specifies that the tool will generate a report of issues found in the file but will not remove any data.
/M	Specifies that all macros in document files will be removed.
/?	Displays a list of all available parameters.

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Log file

When the Remove Hidden Data add-in is finished reviewing the file(s), a log file displays the results of the review process. You can save this file if you want to refer to it later.

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