The Document Inspector
Intro
I just wanted to introduce myself quickly as I am a new poster. My name is Reed Shaffner and I am the newly appointed world-wide product manager for Microsoft Word. In addition to working on Word, I also do a lot of work around accessibility and sustained engineering across the Office Client.
The Document Inspector
Comments, personal information, hidden text, and more have always been a major pain point for users, particularly when they send information outside of their corporation. So in the 2007 release we went about addressing the problem by proving users a way to quickly to remove this sort of information from a document. At a high level, the document inspector provides users with a single place to go in order to ensure their document doesn't contain hidden content that should not be distributed.
Using the Document Inspector
The document inspector is located in the prepare menu which can be can found by clicking on the Office Button (Alt+F, E, I). When launching the inspector, if you haven't saved your file before making the most recent changes, you will be prompted to do so. It's not required that you save; however, the reason we provide this dialogue is because once you run the inspector, and choose to remove certain components of a document, they are GONE.
Once the inspector has launched you are provided with different types of information and metadata the inspector can look for and remove. Once you click inspect, you will be provided with a dialogue that states what was found and you can decided whether or not to remove that information.
So, when would I use it?
So as the product manager for Word, I spend a ton of time producing content. This often has to go through numerous review cycles with legal, our PM's, and others. After numerous rounds of markups and review, what started as a regular old document is often littered with comments, revisions, and markups galore. In addition, because I created the document, my personal information is available to any curious reader. Once I am ready to publish my content I would run the inspector. Because I don't want readers seeing all the comments or reading my personal information, I would search for, and remove it. I probably also don't want people seeing hidden text so I would get rid of that too. I would want to hold onto things like headers and watermarks because I use them in my documents.
With this new functionality I can be reassured that when I am sending documents outside of my company, I'm not sharing information I didn't want to. So that covers a brief introduction to the document inspector but we will be posting again soon on the nitty-gritty details and extensibility.
Reed Shaffner
Product Manager
Microsoft Word
