Who is "Author?"

Personally identifiable information (PII) is a hot-button issue these days. If you've ever had your identity stolen, you'll understand why. Personally, I spent about six months clearing up my identity being stolen about a year ago. Lame.

If are concerned with PII in your Word documents—because maybe you are going to distribute the document outside of your organization—there's a nifty new feature in Word 2007 called the Document Inspector that you should check-out. Reed blogged about it awhile ago and I'm going to talk a bit more about it here. Specifically, and somewhat ironically, I'm going to tell you how to re-enable PII to be stored in your document after running the PII Document Inspector.

Since re-enabling PII storage in a document is much less common than removing PII from a document, the option to re-enable PII is relatively hard to get to, but it's there and it's useful if you've ever faced a situation like this: Sally's team is working on a proposal for a client. They sent a draft to the client on Monday and asked for feedback via tracked changes and comments. When Sally gets the draft back, she sees a bunch of tracked changes and comments attributed to "Author" [see Reviewing Pane on the left side of the screen shot below].

Because Sally is a ninja Word user, she knows that her client does not have some overachieving employee of her client named "Author," but that the client ran the PII Document Inspector after having their entire team review and mark-up the proposal. Running the PII Document Inspector removed all of the reviewers' names from the changes and comments and replaced them with "Author."

But now Sally needs to have her team review the revisions, and she doesn't want all of her teams' changes and comments to also be attributed to "Author." So, after opening the PII-free version of the document on her computer, Sally clicks on the Office Button in the top left hand of Word and clicks Word Options. After clicking on Trust Center, Sally sees the following and clicks on Trust Center Settings.

She clicks on Privacy Options and clears the check box next to "Remove personal information from file properties on save," and the she clicks OK.

Sally can now email the document out to her team with Track Changes turned on, and the names of her teammates will be associated with their changes and comments.

In short, Sally's client used the Document Inspector to make their changes and comments anonymous before sending it to Sally, and then Sally unchecked the check box that causes the anonymity to happen.

PII. Now you see it…now you don't…and now you do again.

-Jonathan