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Document Inspector on Mac: what you actually get (and what you don't)

Last updated: 30 September 2026

What Microsoft says

Microsoft's page Inspect document applies to Word for Microsoft 365, Word for Microsoft 365 for Mac and Word for the web. For the desktop app on Windows it gives the familiar route — File › Info › Check for Issues › Inspect Document. For the web version it says document inspection is not available and suggests opening the file in the desktop app. For the Mac it says Word for Mac does not have a document inspector, and offers one alternative: view and change the document properties by hand through File › Properties, using the Summary tab and the Custom tab, where custom properties can be selected and deleted.

Microsoft's main article on Document Inspector, Remove hidden data and personal information by inspecting documents, presentations, or workbooks, covers Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Visio and uses the same File › Info route throughout. It does not mention the Mac at all. We could not find a Microsoft page that says one way or the other whether Excel or PowerPoint for Mac have it, so we will not claim either. If you do not see Check for Issues in your copy, you do not have it.

What Document Inspector looks for on Windows

This is what a Mac user is missing, taken from Microsoft's article. In Word, the inspectors cover comments, revisions, versions and annotations; document properties and personal information; headers, footers and watermarks; hidden text; custom XML data; and invisible content. In PowerPoint they cover comments and annotations, document properties, invisible on-slide content, off-slide content, presentation notes and custom XML. In Excel the list is longer: hidden rows and columns, hidden worksheets, invisible content, custom XML, and — in the same article — external links, embedded files, cached data such as PivotTables and slicers, filters and hidden names, among others.

Microsoft's article also carries two warnings worth repeating. Removed content may not come back with Undo, so inspect a copy. And in Excel, removing hidden rows or columns that contain data "might change the results of the calculations or formulas".

How each of these compares with ScrubDrop, item by item, is in Office Document Inspector vs ScrubDrop.

Document Inspector has limits on Windows too. The ICO notes that it "cannot identify when personal information is hidden in remote rows and columns" (ICO guidance on spreadsheets), and the ICO's PSNI penalty notice observes that it would not alert a user to worksheets that are simply not visible as tabs.

What you can do by hand on a Mac

Word

• Properties: File › Properties, then read every field on the Summary and Custom tabs, as Microsoft describes.
• Tracked changes: on the Review tab, accept or reject all changes. Microsoft's tracked changes page includes the Mac steps and warns that the No Markup view "only temporarily hides changes".
• Comments: Microsoft gives separate instructions for deleting them, and accepting or rejecting changes leaves them in place.

Excel

• Hidden sheets: Microsoft's page Hide or unhide worksheets covers macOS: the Unhide dialog lists the hidden sheets. The same page warns that sheets set to "very hidden" are not listed by Unhide.
• Hidden rows and columns: look for gaps in the row numbers and column letters, the check suggested in the government's "Hidden data" leaflet.
• Pivot tables: the same leaflet warns that source data behind pivot tables and charts "is not always visible" but can still be extracted, and suggests exporting to CSV so everything can be inspected.

PowerPoint

• Notes: read the notes of every slide, not just the ones you presented from. Microsoft lists presentation notes as one of the things Document Inspector looks for.
• Off-slide and invisible content: Microsoft's list also includes content placed off the slide and invisible content on it. Look around the edges of every slide in the normal editing view, not only in the slide show.

What you can't easily do by hand

Some things are hard to find without looking inside the file, on any platform:

• Very hidden sheets. The format allows a sheet state of veryHidden, which ECMA-376 (§18.18.68) describes as hidden and unable to be shown in the user interface, "only available programmatically".
• Pivot caches. A pivot table's cache can store the source records with the file (ECMA-376 §18.10.1.68), whether or not the source sheet is still there.
• Revision save IDs in Word files, which can show that two documents started from the same original (ECMA-376 §17.15.1.71). They are not among the Word inspectors Microsoft lists.
• Image metadata such as EXIF in pictures pasted into a document.

ECMA-376 defines every .docx, .xlsx and .pptx file as a ZIP archive of XML parts, so one manual route is to rename a copy of the file to .zip, unzip it and read the parts. That works, but few people will do it before every send.

Using ScrubDrop on a Mac

ScrubDrop is a web page, so it runs in Safari, Chrome or Firefox on a Mac the same way it does anywhere else. The file is read in the browser tab and not uploaded; the page's Content Security Policy does not allow it to connect back to its own site. For a file of 10 MB or more, use Chrome or Firefox: Safari needs much more memory for a large workbook and can stop part way.

It lists what it finds for free, in every category it knows — properties, comments, tracked changes, hidden and very hidden sheets, hidden rows and columns, pivot caches, links to other files, defined names, speaker notes, off-slide objects, embedded objects, custom XML, revision save IDs and image metadata — and points out white or tiny text without removing it. The free version removes properties, comments and tracked changes from one file at a time; ScrubDrop Pro removes the structural categories and handles several files at once. After removing, ScrubDrop opens the new file again with different parsers and will not offer a file that fails that check.

Where it stops: it does not read text inside images, and it does not decide whether what is visible is fine to send. Its re-check is a strong signal, not a promise. Some files it refuses rather than guesses at, including macro-enabled files, .xlsb and encrypted files.

How to check this yourself

1. Open your Office app on the Mac and look under File › Info for Check for Issues. If it is missing, you have no inspector in that app.
2. Work through the Word, Excel and PowerPoint lists above on a copy of the file.
3. If you have access to Office on Windows, run Document Inspector there as a second pass.
4. Open the final file and look at every page, sheet and slide before sending.

Questions