DOCX Metadata Remover

Drop .docx files hereor click to browse — several at once is fine

Works in your browser

•No uploads to servers

This clears the document properties — author, company, template, editing time and dates. It does not touch tracked changes, comments, or the names attached to them, because those are part of what the document says rather than properties of the file. Review those in Word before sharing.

Common uses

Sending a contract or offer letter

The template name and the company field often identify the internal process a document came from, even after the visible text has been anonymised.

Submitting work for blind review

Journals and grant bodies reject submissions whose author property gives the writer away. Clearing it is usually an explicit requirement.

Publishing a document under FOI or disclosure

Released documents have repeatedly been traced back to individual civil servants through the author and last-modified-by fields.

Reusing a template

A document built from an old file inherits its creator, its creation date and its total editing time, none of which belong to the new work.

What does a Word file say about you?

Every .docx carries a set of properties you never typed. Word fills in the author from whoever installed it, the last editor from whoever saved it last, the company from the licence, and the template from the file it was based on — which is often the most revealing of the lot, because an internal template name tells a reader which process produced the document. It also records how many minutes the file has been open and how many times it has been saved. None of this appears on the page, all of it survives Save As and emailing, and most people find out it is there when someone else points it out.

A .docx file is a zip archive, and two of the files inside it hold metadata that never appears on the page. docProps/core.xml carries the author, the last person to save the file, the title, subject, keywords, category, revision number and the created, modified and last-printed dates. docProps/app.xml carries the company from the Office licence, the manager, the template the document was based on, the total time the file has been open for editing, and which application and version wrote it.

This tool opens the archive in your browser, empties those fields, and rebuilds the file. Every other entry — the document text, the images, the styles, the numbering, the fonts — is copied across with its compressed bytes unchanged, so nothing is re-encoded and the document you get back renders exactly as it did. The properties are emptied rather than removed outright, because several readers treat a document with missing required properties as damaged, and an empty element is both valid and silent.

What it does not do is edit your content. Tracked changes, comments and the people list that names their authors live in the document body, and stripping them would change what the document says rather than what the file records about itself. If those matter for your document, handle them in Word first. For the camera model and GPS coordinates inside a photograph, the EXIF Remover does the equivalent job for images.

How it compares

Word has this built in: File, Info, Check for Issues, Inspect Document. It is thorough and it is the right answer when you already have Word open on Windows. It is not available in Word for the web, it handles one document at a time, and its all-or-nothing checkboxes remove more than most people intend.

The online alternatives mostly work by uploading. For this particular job that is a strange trade: the reason you are removing the author from a document is usually that the document is sensitive, and sending it to a stranger's server to find out whose name is in it defeats the exercise. This page reads the file with the File API and rebuilds it in the tab, so it never leaves your machine — you can watch the network tab and see nothing go out.

The honest limits are on the page rather than in the small print: properties yes, tracked changes and comments no, and older .doc files not at all.

Tips

The template name is the field people forget. It survives even when the author has been cleared by hand, and an internal template filename can say more about a document's origin than the author does.
Word's own Document Inspector does a similar job, but it only exists in Word on Windows, it works one file at a time, and it also removes things you may want to keep.
The properties are emptied rather than deleted. Some readers treat a .docx with missing required properties as damaged, so the elements stay and their values do not.
Everything except the two property parts is copied through unchanged, so the text, images, styles and page layout are byte-for-byte what they were.
An older .doc file is not a zip and cannot be processed here. Open it in Word and save it as .docx first.
Tracked changes and comments carry author names of their own. This tool leaves them alone on purpose; accept or reject them in Word before sharing a sensitive document.

Frequently asked questions

Is my document uploaded?

No. The file is read in your browser with the File API and rebuilt in the tab. Nothing is sent to a server and nothing is stored. You can confirm it by watching your browser's network tab while you use the page — which is worth doing, because it is the whole reason this runs locally.

Exactly which properties are removed?

From core properties: author, last modified by, title, subject, comments, keywords, category, revision number, and the created, modified and last-printed dates. From application properties: company, manager, template, total editing time, application and application version. The page lists what each of your files actually carried before it cleared them.

Does it remove tracked changes and comments?

No, and that is deliberate. Tracked changes and comments are part of the document's content, not properties of the file, and removing them would change what the document says. Accept or reject them in Word before sharing. The names attached to them are not touched either.

Will the document still look the same?

Yes. Only the two property parts are rewritten. The text, images, styles, numbering, fonts and page layout are copied across unchanged and are not re-encoded, so the file renders exactly as it did.

Can it handle an old .doc file?

No. The legacy .doc format is a compound binary file rather than a zip, and it stores its properties completely differently. Open it in Word and save it as .docx first.

Why are the properties emptied rather than deleted?

Because some readers treat a document with missing required core properties as damaged, particularly when an element carrying an expected type attribute disappears. Keeping the element and clearing its value is valid, safe, and says nothing.

Can I clean several documents at once?

Yes. Drop as many as you like; each is processed separately and reports what it carried, and more than one comes back together as a ZIP.

How is this different from the EXIF Remover?

Same idea, different file type. The EXIF Remover strips camera model, settings and GPS coordinates from photographs; this strips authorship and editing history from Word documents.

Is there a file size limit?

100 MB, which is far larger than a normal Word document. The limit exists because the browser holds both the original and the rebuilt file in memory.