Office XP and 2003 files are often bloated with revision tracking and comments and other "hidden info". MS has released a addin to remove all the hidden and collaboration data, such as change tracking and comments, from Word 2003/XP, Excel 2003/XP, and PowerPoint 2003/XP files: Office 2003/XP Add-in: Remove Hidden Data. After installing the addin, there's a new menu item on the File Menu: "Remove Hiddent Data..." When you distribute an Office document electronically, the document might contain information that you do not want to share publicly, such as information you’ve designated as R... (more at Sanjay's Coding Tips)
While in a pure collaboration environment, arguably this isn't such a great thing (in that you lose the collaboration information). But in environments where pickled documents are distributed (to a customer or vendor), this sort of tool would be very useful (and would provide a nice complement to the existing practice of pdf-ing to pickle documents).
Of course, you have to upgrade to O2.3K to take advantage of it, unless there's a comparable version for the 'legacy' versions of Office most enterprises will be running for another 12 to 18 months....
Posted by esinclai at February 16, 2004 07:22 AM |
It runs fine on Office XP as well.
Posted by: Sanjay on February 16, 2004 11:36 AMhttp://microsoft.weblogsinc.com/entry/1027136379281114/
Posted by: Greg S. on February 16, 2004 02:35 PMReasonably high-end "professional services" firms have had this functionality for years -- sure, they paid programmers to develop the macros for them, but the cost of a truly "clean" document is nothing compared to the embarrassment of sending out something that shows all the past revisions. I'm only surprised that it took this long for MS to offer up this function on their own.
Posted by: Grumpy Sean on February 17, 2004 06:52 AM