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What a find – This is treasure for me !
It all started from a cool little digg.com item by the name of Remove hidden data in Microsoft Word documents, which led to the original piece in USA Today, which in turn lead me to the discovery of a free Microsoft Word 2003/XP Add-in: Remove Hidden Data

* Update * This tool also works with Powerpoint and Excel documents!

This tool lets you easily remove tons of hidden metadata Word automatically stores in your Word files. Stuff like your personal information (Author info), changes tracking etc.. There have been quite a few tales on the Internet over the years of sensitive information discovered this way.

Now, aside from safely discarding potentially embarrassing information as explained above, it can also remove TONS of unnecessary information bloating a file unnecessarily.
I had a frustratingly huge Word document – Over 12MB of a simple file. I guessed it was a combination of a few embedded screenshots and the track changes mechanism which generated such a huge amount of space usage.

After using MS’s tool – The size has been reduced to an amazing 230KB!!!
Just goes to show how big is the waste.

In any case, this add-on is simply a must. Use it every time before publishing/sending a Word document.

And by the way, a quick and dirty way to FIND metadata hidden in Word documents: Start up Word, click File, then Open; under the “Files of Type” drop-down menu select “Recover Text from Any File”; then select the file you want to open and it should display any metadata.