Looking for Portable MS metadata eliminator

[NewKreation]

I seem to remember a freeware program that would erase/scrub/eliminate the metadata stored in Microsoft documents such as Word, Excel, et al.

Does anyone know of a free and portable solution?

Thanks in advance.

[Darkbee]

The type of tool you are describing sounds familiar to me but I can't seem to find it on the web.

As an alternative you could consider using OpenOffice and save in Microsoft format. I believe that OO only saves necessary metadata and nothing that could be considered an infringement of privacy. You can observe the difference in file size between a microsoft doc saved from OO and Word!

[knattefnattetjatte]

Microsoft Office Assistance: Remove personal or hidden information

I don't know if it's portable.

[XPect]

There is also Doc Scrubber that seem to be portable
http://www.docscrubber.com/

[Andrew Lee]

DocScrubber installs a couple of ActiveX controls during setup, but that does not appear to impede its operation when copied to another Win2K machine. I am not sure whether it will work on older version of Windows.

However, it writes settings to the registry. So I won't be adding it to the database.

[Midas]

Old topic update: DocScrubber is still freeware (latest version is v1.2), but is now located at http://www.brightfort.com/docscrubber.html.

Portability status unknown, but 'msvbvm60.dll' and 'mscomctl.ocx' are stated as dependencies.

[webfork]

I was curious about this because there are several metadata options inside FileOptimizer so I checked that program. Although FileOptimizer does some very nice things to Office files, it doesn't remove MetaData. I should add that option as as a feature request.

ExifViewer might be the way to go on this topic. Just select one or more office files, choose Modify - Remove Metadata. Unfortunately, I was only able to test this on a very old version 3.38 that doesn't support metadata writing for DOC (or RTF). Hopefully new versions have fixed this.