Monday, January 30, 2006

Bloatware

If you use Microsoft Office products to create, modify and read documents, you should know that your documents contain a lot more information than you can see on the page. In many cases, this information (known as meta-data) bloats the document way beyond reasonable proportions - but more importantly, can be unmasked by the recipient to reveal sensitive clues about the document. Such as who actually wrote the document, who had input, what it contained in previous versions, etc. Sometimes this information can get people in a bit of trouble. In my case, one Word 2003 document I've been working on had mushroomed to a whopping 12MB in size. Curious, I downloaded Microsoft's Remove Hidden Data tool and behold, the document shrank to a lithe 470KB. Holy meta-diet!

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