July 8, 2026 · 4 min read

How to Remove Metadata From Word & PDF Documents (Free)

Your Word and PDF files hide your name, the app that made them, and edit history. Here's how to strip that metadata for free before you send or submit.

Every Word and PDF you create quietly records who made it, what software (and sometimes which AI tool) produced it, when it was created and last edited, and occasionally your organization's name. Before you send a document to a client, a professor, or a stranger, it's worth knowing what it says about you — and removing it.

What's hidden in a document

• Author and "last modified by" — often your real name or username.
• Application / producer — e.g. "Microsoft Word", "Pages", or an AI export tool.
• Created and modified timestamps — can reveal a document was written in minutes.
• In PDFs, an XMP metadata block that can carry AI-generation tags.

Remove it in 3 steps (free)

• Step 1 — Open Skrubly's Metadata Cleaner and drop in your .docx, .pptx or .pdf.
• Step 2 — It shows you what's inside: author, app, dates, AI tags.
• Step 3 — Click Clean and download the stripped file. Your content is untouched; the hidden data is gone.

It all happens in your browser, so a private document never leaves your device — unlike most online "metadata removers" that upload your file to a server first.