Try Ghoststrip free →

Free · Private · No upload required

Clean Word document metadata before sharing

Every Word document carries your name, company, edit history, revision count, and tracked changes — invisible in the document, visible to anyone who knows where to look.

Clean Word metadata — free What's hiding in my DOCX?
Zero uploads Content preserved Works on DOCX, XLSX, PPTX

What hides inside a Word document?

A .docx file is a ZIP archive containing XML files. The metadata lives in docProps/core.xml and docProps/app.xml — but that's only the start.

👤

Author & last saved by

Your full name from your Microsoft account or Windows account, plus the name of whoever last saved the file.

🏢

Company

Your organisation name from the Microsoft Office license — embedded automatically in every document you create.

📊

Revision count & edit time

How many times the document has been saved, and the total accumulated editing time in minutes.

💬

Comments & comment authors

Resolved and deleted comments often remain in the file. Each carries the commenter's name and timestamp.

✏️

Tracked changes

Insertions and deletions marked with w:author attributes — revealing who edited what, even after "accepting all changes".

👥

Co-authoring identities

The word/people.xml file stores the identities of everyone who has collaborated on the document.

"Accept All Changes" does not remove tracked change authors

Accepting tracked changes removes the visible markup — but the w:author attributes on revision elements can persist in the XML. Anyone who opens the file with a developer tool or extracts the XML can still read who made which edit. Ghoststrip anonymises these attributes directly.

What Ghoststrip removes from Office files

01 —

Core and app properties blanked

Author, last modified by, company, manager, revision number, total editing time, and all date fields in core.xml and app.xml are replaced with empty values.

02 —

Custom properties removed

docProps/custom.xml — which can hold arbitrary key-value pairs added by your organisation's templates — is deleted entirely.

03 —

Comments and people files deleted

word/comments.xml, word/commentsExtended.xml, and word/people.xml are removed. Comment content and co-authoring identity records are gone.

04 —

Tracked change authors anonymised

All w:author attributes on revision elements throughout the document body, headers, and footers are replaced with empty strings. The change markup itself is preserved — only the identity is removed.

05 —

Thumbnails and printer settings removed

Embedded thumbnail images (which can contain rendered page content) and printer settings files (which can reveal network printer names) are deleted.

Supported Office formats

Office files
✓ DOCX Full strip — author, company, comments, tracked change authors, people.xml, custom properties, thumbnails, printer settings.
✓ XLSX Author, company, dates removed. Cell comment author names blanked (comment text preserved). Printer settings removed.
✓ PPTX Author, company, dates removed. Comment authors and slide comments deleted. Thumbnails removed.

Frequently asked questions

Will the document content be affected?
No. Ghoststrip only modifies the metadata XML files inside the DOCX archive. Your text, images, tables, formatting, styles, and tracked change markup are completely preserved. Only the identity information attached to those changes is removed.
What's the difference between this and Word's "Inspect Document"?
Word's Document Inspector is good but requires having Word installed and opening the original file. It can miss tracked change authors in headers and footers, and it doesn't handle the people.xml co-authoring identities introduced in newer versions. Ghoststrip covers all of these and works directly in your browser with no software required.
Does it work on Google Docs exports?
Yes. Google Docs exports to .docx include core.xml metadata with your Google account name. Ghoststrip removes it. Note that Google Docs exports don't typically include tracked changes or people.xml, so those sections will be empty.
Can I clean spreadsheets and presentations too?
Yes. XLSX and PPTX use the same XML structure as DOCX. Ghoststrip handles all three with format-appropriate stripping — for example, it blanks cell comment authors in XLSX rather than deleting them (which would break cell references) and removes slide comment files in PPTX.

Clean your Word document now

Free, private, instant. Works on DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX. Nothing uploaded, nothing stored.

Remove document metadata — no sign-up needed