Speaker notes, hidden slides and comments in PowerPoint: what to take out before you share the file

Last updated: 16 October 2026

Short answer: a .pptx you send carries everything you did not show in the room: the speaker notes, the hidden slides, the comments with their authors, and the location of any video you linked rather than embedded. On Windows, Document Inspector removes notes and comments, but hidden slides are not on its list and it cannot remove pictures in the notes. Unhide and delete hidden slides by hand, and check File › Info for linked media. The file name and the text you can see on the slides are yours to check.

What a presentation keeps besides the slides

A .pptx is a ZIP package of XML parts (ECMA-376, the published specification of the format). Four things in it are easy to forget at the moment you attach the file.

Speaker notes. Each slide's notes are a part of their own, in the ppt/notesSlides folder. They can hold text and pictures. Microsoft's description is plain: the Notes section "can contain text that you might not want to share publicly, especially if the notes were written solely for the use of the person who is delivering the presentation".
Hidden slides. Hiding a slide sets a flag on it and nothing more. Microsoft's page Hide or show a slide says: "A hidden slide remains in the file; it is merely hidden when you run Slide Show view."
Comments. Comments and their replies are stored with the name of each author.
Linked video and audio. A video inserted with Link to File is not stored in the presentation; the presentation stores where it is. Microsoft's page Insert and play a video file from your computer says File › Info gives "a View Links hyperlink" that opens "a dialog box that shows the storage location of any linked files". A location such as a user folder or a network share says something about who made the deck and where.

Windows: Document Inspector, and what it leaves

Microsoft's page Remove hidden data and personal information by inspecting documents, presentations, or workbooks gives the route: on the File tab, select Info, choose Check for Issues and select Inspect Document. Inspect a copy, because "it is not always possible to restore the data that the Document Inspector removes".

For a presentation, Microsoft lists these inspectors: Comments and Annotations, Document Properties and Personal Information, Revision Tracking Data, Invisible On-Slide Content, Off-Slide Content, Presentation Notes and Custom XML Data. What each covers is in our guide to hidden data types in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Select Remove All next to the ones you want gone, then save.

The same page names three limits worth knowing here:

"The Document Inspector cannot remove pictures that are added to the Notes section of a presentation." Open the notes of each slide and delete any picture by hand.
"The Document Inspector does not detect or remove off-slide objects with animation effects." Look around the edge of every slide in Normal view.
Embedded files and objects are found but not removed: Microsoft says removing them "might cause the presentation to not work properly", and suggests replacing them with "a static picture".

Hidden slides are not on the list at all. Unhide each one (right-click the thumbnail and select Unhide Slide, as Microsoft's page describes), decide whether it should go out, and delete it if not. Linked media is not on the list either: use File › Info › View Links, and either remove the video, embed it, or accept that the path travels with the file.

Microsoft also notes that after Document Inspector has removed personal information, PowerPoint keeps removing it each time you save that file, until you change the setting.

Mac and the web

We found no Microsoft page that says whether PowerPoint for Mac has Document Inspector; our guide Document Inspector on Mac covers what can be checked by hand. On the Mac, Microsoft's page says a hidden slide is marked with a "no" symbol; unhide it from the same page's steps for the Mac. Notes and comments are deleted slide by slide.

In the browser

ScrubDrop reads the .pptx in your browser; the file is not uploaded. For free, it lists what it finds — notes, hidden slides, comments, off-slide objects, links to files and the rest — with counts and short samples, and removes document properties and comments from one file at a time. Removing notes, hidden slides, off-slide objects and links to files is part of ScrubDrop Pro.

When Pro removes notes, it removes each notes page as a whole, so pictures placed only on a notes page go too. If the presentation is set to show only a range of slides, removing hidden slides would change which ones are shown, so ScrubDrop asks you to set it to show all slides in PowerPoint first. The result is read again with separate parsers, and a file that fails that re-check is not offered. The re-check is a strong signal, not a promise: open the cleaned file and look through it before you send it.

ScrubDrop keeps embedded video and audio files as they are and does not look inside them for metadata.

What none of this removes

What is on the slides. A name in a footer, a client's logo, a screenshot of an email: that is content, and no tool decides whether it should go.
The file name. "Board deck — draft for the finance director.pptx" says what it says. Rename it before you attach it; ScrubDrop keeps your file name and adds "-scrubbed".
Embedded media's own metadata. A video or recording embedded in the deck can carry details inside its own format. ScrubDrop does not look inside it or remove them.
Copies already sent. Cleaning a file changes the copy in front of you, not one already in someone's inbox or a shared folder.

If you send a PDF instead, the export has its own options for notes, hidden slides and document properties; see what Office metadata survives a PDF export.

How to check this yourself

Make a copy of the .pptx, rename it to .zip and unzip it.
If there is a ppt/notesSlides folder, the deck has notes pages. Open them to see the text.
Look at the first element, p:sld, of each file in ppt/slides: show="0" or show="false" marks a hidden slide. A text search for those is a quick check, not a proof.
Look in the ppt/comments folder for comments, and in ppt/authors.xml or ppt/commentAuthors.xml for the names of their authors.
Search the .rels files under ppt/slides/_rels for TargetMode="External": each hit points outside the file, and its Target is the path or address.

Questions

Does Document Inspector remove hidden slides?

Hidden slides are not on Microsoft's list of what Document Inspector finds and removes in PowerPoint. Microsoft's Hide or show a slide page says a hidden slide remains in the file and is only skipped in Slide Show view. Unhide each one, look at it, and delete the ones that should not go out.

Are pictures in the notes removed with the notes?

Not by Document Inspector: Microsoft says it cannot remove pictures added to the Notes section, so delete them by hand. When ScrubDrop Pro removes notes, it removes each notes page as a whole, so pictures placed only on a notes page go with it.

Does a linked video put a file path in my presentation?

It records where the video file is. Microsoft's page on inserting a video says File › Info shows a View Links link for linked videos, which opens a dialog showing the storage location of each linked file. A path can include a user name or a network share.

Sources: the Microsoft pages linked on this page were checked on 16 October 2026.

See what a presentation carries besides its slides before it goes out, in your browser. Free: one file at a time; every kind of hidden data is listed, and properties, comments and tracked changes are removed. Check a file.