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Company, manager, category, template and custom properties in a Word document

Last updated: 19 October 2026

The author's name, and how to change or remove it, is in the author's name in Word. This page is about the other properties.

The properties, and where each one lives

Microsoft's page View or change the properties for an Office file describes standard properties ("such as author, title, and subject"), automatically updated properties ("statistics that are maintained for you"), and custom properties, which can hold "a text, time, or numeric value" or yes or no. For Word it says that on the Summary tab of Advanced Properties "you can add or edit the Title, Subject, Author, Manager, Company, Category, Keywords (also called Tags), and Comments".

In the file, the format (ECMA-376) puts them in three parts:

Custom properties are the easiest to forget. A document management system, a matter or case number, a client code, a "Checked by" field added by a colleague years ago: each stays until someone removes it.

How values arrive from templates and earlier documents

A document made by copying another one, or with Save As, keeps that document's properties. A document made from a template starts from the template's content and settings; Microsoft's page Change the Normal template (Normal.dotm) says that "any changes that you make to Normal.dotm will be applied to documents that you create in the future". We found no Microsoft page that says which document properties a new document takes from its template, so check it yourself once:

1. Create a new document from each template your team uses, including the blank document.
2. Open File › Info › Properties › Advanced Properties, and read the Summary and Custom tabs.
3. Note any value already filled in. Work out whether it comes from the template, from Word's settings or from your document system, change it at that source, and create another document to check the result.

Removing them

• Document Inspector (File › Info › Check for Issues › Inspect Document, on Windows). Microsoft's Document Inspector page lists, for Word, document properties including the information on the Summary, Statistics and Custom tabs, and the template name, among what the Document Properties and Personal Information inspector removes. Run it on a copy.
• By hand: clear each field on the Summary tab, and delete each custom property on the Custom tab.

Two things are separate from the properties and need their own check:

• Fields that show a property. A cover page or a header can show the title, company or a custom property through a field. The text a field displays is part of the document. Microsoft's page does not say whether removing the properties changes it. Press Alt+F9 on Windows to show field codes, look for fields such as DOCPROPERTY, and decide whether the shown text should stay.
• The attached template's path. Besides the template name in the properties, a document can record the path of its attached template in its settings, as a link to another file. See custom XML, embedded objects and template paths.

What ScrubDrop does with them

ScrubDrop reads the .docx in your browser; the file is not uploaded. It lists the properties it finds, with short samples, and the free version removes them from one file at a time: the core, extended and custom properties parts, which takes out the template name, the company, the manager and every custom property together. Fields that showed a property keep the text they showed, so read the cover page and headers afterwards. The attached template's path counts as a link to another file, and removing it is part of ScrubDrop Pro. After removing, ScrubDrop reads the result again with separate parsers and offers it only if nothing of the chosen categories remains.

How to check this yourself

1. Make a copy of the .docx, rename it to .zip and unzip it.
2. Open docProps/core.xml and docProps/app.xml and read the elements in the table above.
3. If there is a docProps/custom.xml, every property element in it is a custom property, with its name in the name attribute.
4. Search word/document.xml and the header and footer parts for field instructions that show properties, such as DOCPROPERTY, TITLE, AUTHOR and TEMPLATE. A field's instruction can be split across XML elements, so a plain search can miss it; also look at the field codes in Word with Alt+F9.

Questions

Sources: the Microsoft pages linked on this page were checked on 19 October 2026.