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Press releases and media kits in Word or PowerPoint: what to clean before journalists get them

Last updated: 25 October 2026

When to send and what the release says, the embargo included, is a decision for you and your communications team; this page is only about what the file carries besides the text. Files for your own clients, by kind of work, are in before you send an Office file to a client. Whether to send the release as a .docx or as a PDF is covered in detail in .docx or PDF: what each one carries; the section below only adds what matters for a release.

What a release or media kit file can still carry

A release is written to be quoted and passed on, so the file may travel further than the person you sent it to.

Comments and tracked changes from sign-off

Microsoft's page Accept or reject tracked changes in Word is direct about the usual mistake: "To remove tracked changes, you must accept or reject them. Choosing the No Markup view only temporarily hides changes. They will be visible again the next time someone opens the document." A release that looks clean on your screen can still hold the quote legal took out.

Before you accept everything, read the changes. Accepting keeps every insertion, including a sentence someone added that was never approved; rejecting brings back what was deleted. If the version you mean to send is not simply "all changes accepted", go through them one by one. Then delete every comment. What Word still keeps after Accept All, such as editing-session ids that can link drafts, is in after Accept All Changes.

Properties, custom properties and the template

Microsoft's Document Inspector page lists what its Document Properties and Personal Information inspector removes from a Word document, including the "Summary, Statistics, and Custom tabs of the Document Properties dialog box", "Username" and "Template name". Its Comments, Revisions, Versions, and Annotations inspector covers comments, "Revision marks from tracked changes" and "Document version information". Microsoft's page View or change the properties for an Office file says custom properties can have names "from a list of suggested names" or names you define yourself, so they can carry an internal word: a status, a project or the client.

A release often starts from an agency's or a department's template. The template's name is a document property, and a Word document can also keep the path of the template attached to it. Both are covered in Word's company, manager, template and custom properties.

Photos and pictures in a media kit

Cropping does not take anything out of the file. Microsoft's page Crop a picture in Office says that "by default, after you crop a picture, the cropped areas remain part of the file, hidden from view", and that they "can potentially be seen by others". A product shot cropped to hide a whiteboard, or a team photo cropped to one person, still holds the whole picture. The same page has you select the picture, select Picture Format › Compress Pictures and, under Compression Options, select Delete cropped areas of pictures; it advises deleting them only once you have made all the crops you want, because the deletion can be undone only until the file is saved (on a Mac, the page says it can't be undone), and says that only the desktop apps can delete the cropped areas, not Word or PowerPoint for the web. The same dialog also compresses the pictures to the Resolution you choose, and Microsoft's page Reduce the file size of a picture warns that compressing "may make the image look different because of loss of detail"; it applies only to the selected picture while Apply only to this picture is checked. For high-resolution press photos, send the full pictures as separate files rather than relying on the copies in the document.

Pictures can also carry their own metadata, such as the camera, the date and time and sometimes the place they were taken. Document Inspector's lists on Microsoft's page do not mention picture metadata. If location or date matters, clean the photo itself before you insert it, or check the pictures in the finished file (below). More on pictures and the preview image Office saves is in thumbnails and preview images.

A PowerPoint media kit or briefing deck has its own places: speaker notes, hidden slides and slide comments. They are covered in speaker notes, hidden slides and comments in PowerPoint.

PDF or Word for a release

Journalists often copy text from a release, and some ask for an editable file. A PDF carries much less than a .docx: no comments or tracked changes unless you print the markup into it, and none of the Word file's parts. But it has properties of its own. In Word for Windows, Microsoft's page Save or convert to PDF or XPS in Office desktop apps has you open the Options: to leave tracked changes out, make sure Document is selected under Publish what rather than Document showing markup, and to include document properties in the PDF, make sure Document properties is selected; leave it clear if you do not want them there, and check the PDF afterwards. Clean the Word file first either way, because the PDF is made from it. The comparison is in .docx or PDF and the PDF's own metadata in metadata when exporting to PDF.

If the release goes out as a link to a file in OneDrive or SharePoint rather than as an attachment, the recipient may reach more than the file; see link or attachment.

Before you send it

1. Work on a copy. Keep the signed-off file as it is. Microsoft recommends running Document Inspector on a copy, "because it is not always possible to restore the data that the Document Inspector removes".
2. Tracked changes and comments. Read them, accept or reject each change so that the text is the approved text, and delete every comment.
3. Pictures. Delete the cropped areas of pictures, and use photos whose own metadata you have checked.
4. PowerPoint. Delete speaker notes, and delete or unhide hidden slides, in a deck that goes to the press.
5. Properties. On Windows, run Document Inspector (File › Info › Check for Issues › Inspect Document) with Document Properties and Personal Information, and Comments, Revisions, Versions, and Annotations selected (in PowerPoint, Comments and Annotations, Revision Tracking Data, and Presentation Notes; Microsoft's page says it cannot remove pictures added to the Notes section). If you want an author such as the press office, set it after the inspector and check, in Word, Excel and PowerPoint alike, that it is still there after you save and reopen the file. For PowerPoint, Microsoft's page says that after Document Inspector removes personal information, PowerPoint keeps removing it when the file is saved, unless you select Change setting in the Personal Information Removal Enabled notification.
6. The file name. Rename it from "v7 legal final" to something you would want quoted.
7. Read the copy once more, the headers and footers included, and check it as below.

How to check the file yourself

1. Make a copy, rename it to .zip and unzip it.
2. Open docProps/core.xml for the author (dc:creator), the person who last saved it (cp:lastModifiedBy) and the dates; docProps/app.xml for Company and Template; and docProps/custom.xml, if there is one, for custom properties.
3. In a Word file, search the parts in the word folder for author=: tracked changes (<w:ins , <w:del , moves and formatting changes) and comments all carry it. Look for comments.xml and people.xml too.
4. Open each picture in word/media or ppt/media. A picture that shows more than the slide or page did was cropped in Office: the crop is stored as an <a:srcRect> next to the picture, which Microsoft's Open XML SDK reference, quoting ISO/IEC 29500-1, describes as "the portion of the blip used for the fill".
5. In a deck, a ppt/notesSlides folder means speaker notes, and show="0" or show="false" on a slide in ppt/slides marks it as hidden.

What ScrubDrop does

ScrubDrop reads .docx, .xlsx and .pptx files in your browser; the file is not uploaded. For free, it lists each supported kind of hidden data it finds in a release or deck, with counts and short samples, picture metadata and speaker notes included. The free version, one file at a time, removes the document properties (the author, the last saved by, the dates, the company, the template's name and every custom property), removes the comments and accepts the tracked changes. Accepting keeps what was inserted, so if the approved text is not "all accepted", decide the changes in Word first.

ScrubDrop Pro adds rejecting tracked changes instead of accepting them, removing picture metadata (from JPEG, PNG and GIF pictures), speaker notes, hidden slides, custom XML and links to other files (the path of an attached Word template included), and several Word, Excel and PowerPoint files at once, such as the documents of a media kit. ScrubDrop reads only those Office files: photos, logos and PDFs sent on their own are not checked, so clean them separately. ScrubDrop does not delete the cropped areas of pictures: it keeps each picture as it is apart from its metadata, so use Delete cropped areas of pictures in Office. Apart from the tracked changes it accepts or rejects and the hidden content Pro removes, it does not change the text; it does not rename the file, and it does not know what is under embargo. The result is read again by software separate from the one that wrote it, and a file that does not pass is not offered.

Questions

Sources: the Microsoft pages linked on this page were checked on 25 October 2026. ScrubDrop is not affiliated with Microsoft.