Was the Microsoft 1999 Annual report produced on a Macintosh?

Richard M. Smith (rms@computerbytesman.com)
October 4, 1999

Microsoft Word documents are notorious for containing private information in file headers that people would sometimes rather not see get out. An interesting example is the 1999 Microsoft annual report which was released on the Web last week as a Word document. The file headers indicate that the annual report was created on a Macintosh and not Windows!

The Word version of the report is available at this URL:

   http://www.microsoft.com/msft/ar99/lts.htm

Last evening I downloaded the annual report and used a .DOC file dumper utility to display its contents. I found the following revision log in the file:

   0008FB2B: Kerry Leimer Jay's G3:Temporary Items:Word Work File A 3
   0008FB9D: Kerry Leimer Jay's G3:Desktop Folder:ar99.doc
   0008FBF9: Kerry Leimer.Jay's G3:Temporary Items:Word Work File A 2862
   0008FC71: Kerry Leimer Jay's G3:Desktop Folder:ar99.doc
   0008FCCD: Kerry Leimer Jay's G3:Desktop Folder:ar99.doc
   0008FD29: Kerry Leimer Jay's G3:Temporary Items:AutoRecovery save of
             ar99.doc
   0008FDB1: Kerry Leimer Jay's G3:Desktop Folder:ar99.doc
   0008FE0D: Kerry Leimer Jay's G3:Temporary Items:AutoRecovery save of
             ar99.doc
   0008FE95: Kerry Leimer Jay's G3:Jay's
             Documents:current:Microsoft_AR99:MSFT_WEB:
             msft:download:ar99.doc
   0008FF4F: Kerry Leimer Jay's G3:Jay's
             Documents:current:Microsoft_AR99:MSFT_WEB:
             msft:ar99:downloads:ar99.doc

The revision log clearly shows Macintosh-style file paths and the computer name appears to indicate that the document was edited on a Macintosh G3 system.

In addition, other fields in the file header say that the file was created and edited by Word 98 for the Macintosh:

   Created by: Word 98 for Macintosh (Build 9/30/98)
   Revised by: Word 98 for Macintosh (Build 9/30/98)

Microsoft does provide instructions on their Web site on how to remove some of this private information from a Word document file before it is publicly distributed. These instructions can be found at:

  WD97 How to Minimize Metadata in Microsoft Word Documents>
  http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q223/7/90.ASP

However the rules are quite complicated and a better choice, I believe, is to use RTF or HTML for public documents. In the future, I would like to see an option to the save command in Word to remove all this extra information from a document file before it is written to disk.

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