From the course: Word 2016 Essential Training

Getting documents ready for sharing

From the course: Word 2016 Essential Training

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Getting documents ready for sharing

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- When creating documents here in Word 2016, the time will come when you'll probably want to share your documents with others. Maybe to allow them to read the content or maybe even to collaborate on the document, to add their comments, make changes, and so on. That's what this chapter is all about, sharing your documents and the first thing you'll want to do is prepare your document for sharing. Because there is some information that's stored with every document, it's called metadata. And it could contain information you don't want to share: who's the author, for example, document properties. Well, we're going to work with this document, our Landon Hotel guide, you can open up LHGuide1201 from the chapter 12 folder of your exercise files. And as we scroll through this, it looks like a pretty simple document, not too much to worry about sharing here. Except, when we go to the file tab and select info at the top if it's not already selected and look over to the right, you can see there are some document properties: things like the size, editing time, a little further down the authors, you can see it right there, last modified by, some names attached to this. This is all metadata that is going to be stored with your document and if you don't want to share it, there is a way to remove it. We go over here to the check for issues button. Give it a click. There's three different types of issues. Inspect document is going to look for those hidden properties and personal information. Accessibility is making our documents easily accessible to those who have difficulties and disabilities reading our document. And we can also check for compatibility if we're going to be sharing with people who use older versions of Microsoft Word. Let's start with inspecting our document. Give it a click. You can see the things that can be inspected here: comments, revisions, document properties and personal information, there it is, macros, embedded documents. As we scroll further down, XML data. If there are any fields or placeholders in here, you might have XML data stored with the document. Headers, footers and watermarks could contain information you don't want to share. Invisible content and hidden texts are also going to be inspected when we click the inspect button. Give it a click. Alright, looks like a number of checkmarks indicating that we don't have to worry about certain items like comments, revisions, annotations; there aren't any, at least not yet. People haven't worked on the document and added their comments and made revisions, tracking changes; no items found. Beautiful. But under document properties and personal information, you can see the document properties and the author information is stored with this document. If we don't want to share that with people, we can click remove all and it will be removed. Now we see a checkmark. Other things like embedded documents, macros, no problem until we get down to XML data. There was some found. Let's remove that as well. Under headers, footers and watermarks, you can see we do have headers and footers in this document. I wouldn't recommend clicking remove all because this will remove all of your headers, your footers and your watermarks. So if you really want to just check them out to see if there's information in there, do not click remove all, just leave it and inspect it manually. Invisible content, no hidden text, we're good to go. Let's click close and now let's go back, the back button to our document and check out those headers and footers. Well the header is just the location. The footer is just some simple text. So we don't need to remove those, we're safe. We do need to save our changes though when we inspect and remove things. Let's go up to the save button and give it a click. Go back to the file tab now and know that we're going to be sharing a document that's not going to contain certain pieces of information. We still get to see it over here, it's just not going to be shared. Let's go down to check for issues and check accessibility. Give that a click. Over here on the right hand side, the accessibility checker opens up and you can see it's updating results. Now there could be issues in here that will make it difficult for those with disabilities to read our document and we can go through them one by one, fixing them on the fly. Instead of waiting for this to update results, I just want you to know it's there if that's important to your document. Let's click the close button and go back to the file tab now and check for issues and check compatibility. When we give it a click, you can see some text box positioning is going to change if we save it to every possible version. Now if we click this drop down, we can choose versions or deselect some if we know that the people are not using Word 97-2003, they have at least Word 2007 and 10. We can deselect that. Look at that. There's only one issue now: shapes and text boxes will be converted to effects that weren't available in the older formats. So, we could be using some effects that didn't exist in those older versions and that's ok. So we can click ok. Now we know that when we save our changes, we have a document that is ready to be shared without divulging personal information or confidential information, anything that is attached to the document we don't want people to see.

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