Excel for Mac: Privacy for your Workbooks

This week in our series about Microsoft Excel for Mac, we show how to use the Privacy settings for your workbooks to avoid unintentionally sharing personal or hidden information when sharing a file.

Avoid oversharing – the 'Document Inspector'

In Excel for Windows (and Word and PowerPoint), the ‘Document Inspector’ (often called the “Doc Inspector" for short) can help you find and remove private information from your files.

Here are just a few of the places in Excel files that hidden information may reside, and that the “Doc Inspector” will find for you:

• document properties and personal information
• hidden rows, columns, and worksheets
• embedded files or objects
• comments and ink annotations
• items that may have cached data (such as PivotTables and PivotCharts).

To run the “Doc Inspector” on Windows, go to File > Info and press ‘Check for Issues’ > ‘Inspect Document’.  Then you'll see the dialog as shown below.  You can pick which items to inspect, but it's fine to just keep them all selected.

On Windows, the “Doc Inspector” also helps you easily remove most of these items after you've used it to inspect your document.  After the inspection is completed, you'll be presented with a report of what it found, and options to remove private information for many of the items.  Some items can't be removed automatically, so you would remove those manually, if necessary.

How does this work on Mac?

As you can see above, the ‘Document Inspector’ supports many areas where hidden and private information could be found and gives you control over most of it.  Unfortunately, the apps on Mac don't include the ‘Document Inspector’.  Even so, it's very helpful to know what it looks for, because you can look for many of these items yourself. 

Even though Excel for Mac doesn't have the “Doc Inspector”, it still has some basic controls to help remove hidden and potentially private information.  It just doesn't go to the same great lengths that we see on Windows.

How to remove private info on Mac

There’s not much to think about here.  It’s a simple setting that you can find in the Excel preferences. The steps are:

• go to the Excel menu, choose Preferences > Security.  You might think it would be in the Privacy settings, but those settings are related to how you use Excel, not the specific workbook
• tick the box for ‘Remove personal information from this file on save’ 

• close the preferences.  You can always come back and untick the box if you change your mind.

What information gets removed on Mac?

When you tick the box for ‘Remove personal information from this file on save’, it will cause some information to be removed from the file when saved.  Once you save and close the file, this information is lost and can only be recovered by restoring an older version of the file.

The following information is removed from file properties:

• Author
• Manager
• Company
• Last saved by.

To find and review these, go to the File menu and choose Properties.

Also, the name of the person who added a Comment or Note is removed and changed to ‘Author’ (unless it was already edited by someone).  As you can see below, when you add a comment to a workbook, it will show the name of the commentor.  After you tick the box to remove personal information, the name is changed to ‘Author’.

For more information, please see Microsoft's help article on the subject - Help protect your privacy (support.microsoft.com)

We hope you find this topic helpful. Check back for more details about Excel for Mac and how it’s different to Excel for Windows.