Inspect Document in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows

When your presentation is something you deliver, it rarely matters if you have any content invisible to your audience, 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 check your presentation for such hidden properties and personal information, and clean whatever information or data you want removed.

Note: It's recommended to create a copy of your presentation before cleaning up the content using the Inspect Document option. You can then share the new copy of your presentation with others, and retain the original copy with yourself just in case you need the information at a later date.

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

Category	Details
Comments and ink annotations	This information can enable other people to see the names of people who worked on your presentation, comments from reviewers, and changes that were made to your presentation. In addition if you used an ink capable device, all your scribbles, doodles, or handwritten notes may be part of the presentation.
Document properties and personal information	Document properties, also known as metadata include details about your presentation such as author, subject, and title. If you used specific features, your document might also contain additional kinds of personally identifiable information (PII) such as e-mail headers, send-for-review information, routing slips, and file path information for publishing web pages.
Custom XML data	Presentations can contain custom XML data that is not visible in the document itself. The Inspect Document feature can find and remove this XML data.
Invisible on-slide content	Your presentation might contain objects that are not visible because they are formatted as invisible in the Selection and Visibility task pane.
Off-slide content	PowerPoint presentations can contain objects that are not visible because they were dragged off the slide area into the off-slide area. This off-slide content can include text boxes, clip art, sound files, graphics, and tables.
Presentation notes	The Notes section of a presentation can contain text that you might not want to share publicly.
Document server properties	If the presentation is saved to a location on a document management server, such as a Document Workspace site or a library based on Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services, the presentation might contain additional document properties or information related to this server location.

Follow these steps to use the Inspect Document option to remove hidden data and personal information from your presentation in PowerPoint 2013:

Launch PowerPoint 2013, 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.
Access the File menu, and choose the Info Pane to get to Backstage view, as shown in Figure 1. Thereafter, select the Check for Issues option, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 1.

Figure 1: Info Pane within the Backstage view
This brings up a small drop-down menu as shown in Figure 2. From this drop-down menu, select the Inspect Documentoption, highlighted in red within Figure 2.

Figure 2: Inspect Document option selected within the Check for Issues drop-down menu
This opens the Document Inspector dialog box, as shown in Figure 3. 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. Now, click the Inspect button, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 2.

Figure 3: Document Inspector dialog box
This will inspect the presentation and display the results within the Document Inspector dialog box as you can see in Figure 4. 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.

Figure 4: Document inspection results
As you can see in Figure 4 above, there is one inspection result category that has a Remove All button next to it (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.
Once done, click the Close button, (highlighted in blue within Figure 4, above) to apply the changes. You can optionally click the Reinspect button (highlighted in green within Figure 4, above) if you want to inspect the document again.
Save your presentation.