How can I remove personal information from PowerPoint documents?

When you create or even edit a presentation, PowerPoint automatically adds selected personal data of the user to the file.

If you plan to share your presentation externally (particularly via a public medium like a website), you may want to remove this personal information from your document.

This post is part of our hints and tips for standard PowerPoint features.  PPT Productivity is a time saving PowerPoint plugin.  If you’d like to boost your productivity and stop wasting time on alignment, formatting and finding slides to reuse, visit our homepage and download our free trial today!

To remove personal information from your document, use the PowerPoint Document Inspector. To access the document inspector functions, with your presentation open, go to File tab, select ‘Info’ then click on ‘Check for issues’.

You will see three options, choose the first option – Inspect Document

The Document Inspector will open. Here you can decide which content you want to review by checking or unchecking the boxes.

When you have finished making your selections, click ‘Inspect’ to run the PowerPoint Document Inspector.

Any categories which are found to have potentially sensitive data will be flagged with an exclamation mark. A ‘Remove All’ button will also appear next to the categories that have potential issues. Click the ‘Remove All’ button to remove the data from your PowerPoint presentation. Hit ‘Reinspect’, then ‘Inspect’ once again. The PowerPoint Document inspector will run again to see whether there are any other issues. When you have finished, Close the Document Inspector.