Oops! Microsoft exposes hidden data in a Word document

The other day I mentioned what happens when you don’t pay attention to potentially embarrassing data that might be buried in Word documents. So I was especially amused to find an example on Microsoft’s own site.

Microsoft UK offers a FAQ on licensing, which in turn contains a link to a “Virtual-machine environment brief” (link leads to a file in Word .doc format). When I opened the document in Word 2007, I saw a slew of proofreading and editing changes, plus this comment:

Oops.

Let me reiterate a point I made in the earlier post. The programs in Office 2007 automatically expose this sort of hidden data by default every time you open or save a document. The idea is to make it impossible for you not to notice that your draft document contains artifacts from the editing process. If the person who posted this document had been using Word 2007, they might have been spared this embarrassment.