6.1 Inspect a document for issues - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v Instructor>When you shared electronic copy</v> of an Excel workbook, make sure that you review the workbook for hidden data or personal information that might be stored in the workbook itself, or in it's document properties. The document inspector feature in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Visio can help you find and remove hidden data and personal information in documents that you plan to share. However, some content that we found and removed automatically while other content is found and you need to handle it manually. The following content can be found or removed automatically. Comments and annotations, document properties and personal information, headers and footers, hidden rows and columns, hidden worksheets, custom XML data, and invisible content. Content that is found but you need to handle manually are the following; external links, embedded files or objects, macros of VBA code, BI features with cache data, Excel surveys, scenario manager surveys, filters, and hidden names. Let's take a look at the following document and see where its documented issues are. What we can do here is go to the backstage view. So we'll click on File. Click on Info, go over here to the inspect workbook section, click the drop down box that says Check for Issues and we'll choose Inspect Document, which is gonna check the workbook for hidden properties or personal information. Let's go ahead and do that. It reminds us that we should save our changes because the document inspector might remove data that can't be restored later. There are certain features in here that will be removed and you cannot use the undo button to recover from. So we're going to say no because I have backup copies of this file already. And we can go through and take a look at what we want the document inspector to look at. So right now, everything is on by default. So we can ask the document inspector to look at comments, properties and personal information, the data model, content add ins. And you can just scroll down the list here and take a look at all different things that you want the document inspector to look at. And we mentioned all of those on the previous slide. So what we can do at this point is just click Inspect. And what it's gonna do is let us know what we can go ahead and remove automatically or manually. So if we scroll through the list here now we can see on the comments here it says "The following items were found comments," and we can click on here to go ahead and remove all the comments from our document automatically. So I can click that and remove things. Our documents and personal information, we can go ahead and get rid of those. And if I scroll down just a little bit lower, things like active filters were found as well, but we cannot remove those for you. So we need to actually go in and manually do those ourselves. So here's an example of some of the things we can do manually. So the act of filters here, and some things that we can go through and do automatically just by clicking Removal All. So it's really important to go ahead and do this, but go into the inspection mode being fully aware that some changes cannot be undone. That's why I asked you to go ahead and save a copy of the document before you go ahead and run the document inspector. So let's go ahead and remove some of the information from this document. I'm just gonna go ahead and remove one thing. So let's go to the document properties and personal information here, and let's just click Remove All. Before I do that I'm just gonna move the window over here and we can see the information about this document that we're about to remove. So I'm just gonna click Removal All, like so. And what you'll notice here is in behind the scenes, all that personal information was removed. So now if I scroll back up to the top here, it says now the document properties and personal information they've been removed. So if I wanna go ahead and do a re-inspection of the document I can do that by clicking Reinspect, and I'll just choose what I want to have inspected. Go ahead and inspect. And we'll now notice that document properties and personal information are free and clear. So we've successfully remove that information. Going down a little bit lower and doing another one here says "Active filters". It says "Active filters were found, "we can't remove these for you." So we need to go in and do this ourselves. So what I'm gonna do here is close the document inspector off. I am going to go back over to my table that has the document filters on it. I'm just gonna go in here, I'm gonna manually do this. I'm just gonna clear my filter from sales territory. I am going to go in here and there are no other filters on this table here. So I can see no other filter has been applied. Let's go back over the backstage view, info, check for issues, inspect document. Once again, gives me the warning. I'm just gonna say no. And I'm gonna go in here and click Inspect again. And if I just scroll down here, we will go and find our active filters have now been clear. 'Cause I went in and manually removed those on our own. Okay. So you've seen so far the document inspector is a good way to go ahead and help and find the personal information that you may wanna remove from your document, whether you need to do that manually or automatically and allows for both. So that was a nice little spin through the document inspector. And with that, this brings us to the end of this sub-lesson.