If you’re thinking that the way a Word document looks with formatting marks doesn’t apply to you because you don’t turn on formatting marks in your documents, think again. Just because you don’t turn them on doesn’t mean the recipient or another editor of your document does not. Anyone who opens your Word document might do so with formatting marks visible. Imagine the work that went into both writing and creating the document in Figure 3-2. Isn’t it a shame that the reader has to muddle through the mess of formatting to get to the point?

But formatting marks are just one element of what makes Figure 3-1 so much more professional-looking than Figure 3-2. Many features across Microsoft Office exist to help you create better content more easily. If you don’t take advantage of the available tools, you do more work for inferior results. For example, notice the difference between the clean, readable table in Figure 3-1 and the collection of tabs, spaces, and other workarounds used to fake a table in Figure 3-2. Also note the difference between the SmartArt layout used to create the diagram in Figure 3-1 and the tremendously time-consuming collection of mismatched shapes used in Figure 3-2 to fashion a poor imitation of that diagram. When you look at these features, you can also easily see that this is not just about Word; think about similar content you might create in PowerPoint or Excel. In fact, the same principles apply to the content you create in any program.

The more you take advantage of the tools Microsoft Office provides for creating well-crafted content, the more professional your documents will look and the easier it will be to keep them looking great regardless of how or with whom you share. Something as simple as paragraph indents that don’t line up perfectly or a sloppy chart that looks “close enough” to what you want can detract from your content and diminish the impact of your important information. Rudimentary workarounds—like an Excel formula that uses 20 plus signs to add up a column of numbers, or a bunch of manually positioned text boxes on a slide to fake a PowerPoint layout—make your content more difficult to edit and less likely to become the final product you really wanted.

When your documents are shared by email, good construction isn’t just about a professional-looking result. It’s also about knowing what recipients will see when they receive your document. For example, when you send a document as a formatted email message, it is typically sent over the Internet in HTML format. Documents created in the Microsoft Office programs are designed to be able to translate well to and from HTML. However, if you’re fudging the layout and using workarounds for formatting, neither Outlook 2010 or Outlook 2011—or any other messaging program you might use—will know how to translate it. For example, when you fake the appearance of bullets or a table, as in Figure 3-2, the translator has no way of knowing that you were trying to approximate bulleted text or a table, so the layout could be distorted when the document reaches the recipient.

You might still send some or even most of your documents by email, but there’s a good chance that you’ve at least started to store and share some content online. If you haven’t yet ventured into the cloud, check out Chapter 2 because you might be missing out on some very useful tools (like the freedom to get away from your desk and still get work done when you need to).

If you are already sharing content “up there,” the most important additional consideration is what applications others will use for accessing and editing your content. For the most part, this isn’t different from any other electronic document sharing—users might open your file in Microsoft Office on either Windows or Mac, and they might use a current or earlier version of the programs as discussed earlier. But when you share documents for editing online using Office Web Apps, there are a few considerations to keep in mind:

Metadata, in computer terms, is information that a software program automatically stores in a file to enable some functionality. Virtually all software programs store some type of metadata in their files, the great majority of which is not a privacy risk at all. For example, the version of software used to create a document may be stored in the document as metadata.

The more powerful a software program, the more metadata it is likely to store. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint store metadata such as the date the file was created and the author’s name. Most metadata is not visible in the document window, but can be found through a dialog box. For example, the create date is listed in the Document Properties dialog box.

Unlike document metadata, hidden data refers to content that you add to a document but might not see in the document window. Examples of hidden data include text in Word that is formatted with the hidden font attribute, unresolved tracked changes in Word or Excel, or comments in Word, PowerPoint, or Excel. Content added to commonly used areas of a document such as headers, footers, and footnotes can also be hidden data, depending on the way you view your documents.

The Document Inspector searches for a wide range of potentially hidden content types, including both metadata and hidden data, and gives you the option to remove them from your document. See the Document Inspector options for Word in Figure 3-4.

Figure 3-4. Document Inspector options, shown here for Word, vary by program.

To access the Document Inspector in Word, PowerPoint, or Excel:

The Document Inspector, like any tool that automatically removes hidden data, can be a bit heavy-handed. That is, it will remove either all or nothing of the content types it finds. So, when you’re using any tool for removing hidden data, the most important thing to remember is that just because something can potentially be private information doesn’t mean it is. Be aware of the content types you want to check for and the circumstances in which you consider content to be private information that you want to remove.

For example, headers and footers are usually intentional content that you want to share. However, if you add content to a header or footer in a Word document and then disable that header or footer (such as adding content to a Different First Page header and then turning off the Different First Page feature), the content you added is still saved with the document unless you remove it. So, while it is unlikely that you would want to delete all header and footer content in your document, you might want to check to ensure that no private information is saved in disabled or otherwise unused headers and footers.

When you use the Document Inspector, in addition to simply being aware of what you choose to remove, you might want to keep in mind some other factors, covered in the following section, before removing content and considering your document ready to share.

Checking Out the Prepare For Sharing Options

The new Backstage view in Office 2010 now gives you at-a-glance information about potentially private information in your documents, as you see in the Word 2010 example shown in Figure 3-5.

Figure 3-5. To see the Prepare For Sharing options in Word, PowerPoint, or Excel, click the File tab to open Backstage view and then click Info.

So, before you even get to the Document Inspector, you can see at a glance any features that you might want to address. Also notice that this pane doesn’t exclusively list potential privacy issues. The Check For Issues options also include checking for accessibility to people with sensory disabilities and checking for compatibility with earlier versions.

Remember that the way you view a document can make a tremendous difference in what content you see. For example, in Draft view in Word, you don’t see several types of content—including headers, footers, footnotes, and page layout. Similarly, when viewing slides in PowerPoint, if you don’t have the Notes pane open, you don’t see slide notes.

One solution is to change your view so that you do see all elements on a page, slide, or sheet, but Table 3-3 provides some other tips for addressing common types of hidden data with or without the Document Inspector, and whether you use Office 2010 or Office 2011.

When you need a quick and easy solution to help ensure that your document contains no hidden content that could be a privacy risk, and the recipient of your document will not need to edit it, you might want to save your document to either the Portable Document Format (PDF) or the XML Paper Specification (XPS) format.

The capability to save to PDF or XPS formats is built into Office 2010, and the capability to save as a PDF file is available in Office 2011.

When you take just a few minutes to ensure that you are aware of all the content in your document, there is no reason to be concerned about sharing your document in its original format. However, when you just want a quick solution and the recipient won’t need to edit the file, PDF and XPS file formats can be a nice, simple alternative.

XPS and PDF file formats do not carry over many types of metadata and hidden content, making them a good option for sharing files. However, when you save a copy of your document in one of these formats, file properties information is saved by default. To ensure that you are not sharing private information from file properties in the PDF or XPS formats, you can disable this setting in the Office 2010 programs and, in Office 2011, simply clear the fields as you save to PDF.

If you’re using Windows 7, you have an additional option for removing personal information that’s stored in file properties before you share a document.