Inspect Document in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows

When you create a presentation that you are going to deliver yourself, it rarely matters if you have any content that is invisible to your audience. Such invisible content may include your slide notes, comments, document properties. None of these are visible to your audience and you are free to add any information in these areas that will enable you to be better prepared to deliver your slides.

However, if you need to share the same PowerPoint presentation with colleagues, or even publish it online, all unwritten rules about the invisible information change. Most users don't even think twice about all this information simply because of the lack of awareness, but they should because most of this content may include hidden data or personal information that you may not be permitted to share by your company, or even want to share. There may be times that you don't mind sharing this information, but even then, you need to be aware of what exactly you are providing to prying eyes! This information might be stored in the presentation slides or document properties (meta-data). The Inspect Document option in PowerPoint enables you to check your presentation for such hidden properties and personal information, and clean whatever information or data you want to remove.

Your PowerPoint presentations can contain the following types of hidden data and personal information:

Follow these steps to use the Inspect Document feature to remove hidden data and personal information from your presentation in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows:

1. Launch PowerPoint, and open any existing presentation for which you want to run the Inspect Document feature. If you made any changes to your slides, do save your presentation before you proceed further. If you do not want to alter your original presentation, save a new copy of your presentation and then proceed.
2. Access the File menu, and choose the Info option to get to Backstage view, as shown in Figure 1, below. Thereafter, click the Check for Issues to bring up a small drop-down menu, as shown in Figure 1. From this drop-down menu, select the Inspect Document option, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 1.
3. 
   Figure 1: Inspect Document option selected within the Check for Issues drop-down menu
3. This opens the Document Inspector dialog box, as shown in Figure 2, below. Select the check-boxes to choose the types of hidden content that you want to be inspected. At this point of time, you can go ahead and check all boxes, PowerPoint will just find the hidden content at this time and will not remove that content unless you provide your express permission, as we will explore later in this tutorial.
4. 
   Figure 2: Document Inspector dialog box
4. Now, click the Inspect button, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 2, above. This will inspect the presentation and display the results within the Document Inspector dialog box, as shown in Figure 3, below. For any hidden information found, PowerPoint will provide you with options on how you want to deal with the content, do note that any changes you make at this time cannot be undone.
5. 
   Figure 3: Document inspection results within the Document Inspector dialog box
4. As you can see in Figure 3, each and every individual inspection result category has a Remove All button next to it. One such button has been highlighted in red within Figure 3. To remove the inspection result of a particular category, just click the Remove All button next to it.
5. Once done, click the Close button to apply the changes.
6. Save your presentation often.