Inspect Document in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows

If your presentation is something only you deliver, it rarely matters if you have any content invisible to your audiences, such as your slide notes, comments, and document properties. Typically, 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, the scenario will be different. Most users don't even think twice about all this information simply due to lack of awareness. Actually they should because most of this content may include hidden data or information that you or your company may not want to share. Even if have no problem with sharing that information, 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 option to remove hidden data and personal information from your presentation in PowerPoint 2016 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 Pane to get to Backstage view, as shown in Figure 1, below. Thereafter, click the Check for Issues button, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 1.
3. 
   Figure 1: Info Pane within the Backstage view
3. Doing so brings up a small drop-down menu, as shown in Figure 2, below. In this drop-down menu, select the Inspect Document option, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 2.
4. 
   Figure 2: Inspect Document option selected within the Check for Issues drop-down menu
4. This opens the Document Inspector dialog box, as shown in Figure 3, below. Select the checkboxes to choose the types of hidden content that you want to be inspected. At this point, you can go ahead and select all checkboxes. 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. Now, click the Inspect button, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 3, below.
5. 
   Figure 3: Document Inspector dialog box
5. This step will inspect the presentation and display the results within the Document Inspector dialog box, as shown in Figure 4, below. For any hidden information found, PowerPoint will provide you with options on how you may want to deal with the content. Do note that any changes you make at this time cannot be undone, if you save the presentation after making changes.
6. 
   Figure 4: Document inspection results
6. As you can see in Figure 4 above, there is one inspection result category that has a Remove All button next to it, as shown highlighted in red. You may see more such result categories in your presentation's results. To remove the inspection result of a particular category, just click the Remove All button next to it.
7. Once done, click the Close button, as shown highlighted in blue within Figure 4, above, to apply the changes. You can optionally click the Reinspect button, as shown highlighted in green within Figure 4, if you want to inspect the document again.
8. Save your presentation often.