How to check a PDF or Word document for hidden data
A document is rarely just the words you see. PDFs and Word/Office files carry a surprising amount of hidden data that rides along when you send them — and it has embarrassed law firms, companies and governments who "redacted" a file that still contained the original text underneath.
What hides inside documents
- Tracked changes & comments — edits and side-notes you thought were removed.
- Hidden ("vanished") text — text formatted to be invisible but still in the file.
- Author & company metadata — who wrote it, on which machine, when, and the last person who touched it.
- Macros — embedded code (a common malware vector).
- In PDFs — JavaScript, auto-run actions, embedded files, invisible text, and data appended after the document ends.
Why "delete and re-save" isn't enough
Turning off Track Changes or flattening a PDF doesn't guarantee the data is gone — old revisions, metadata and hidden layers can persist. And you can't fix what you can't see. The first step is always to look.
How to see what's in a document
Open the file in scrub. It reads the document on your device — nothing is uploaded — and shows a plain, ranked list of what it found: hidden text, tracked changes, macros, author metadata, PDF JavaScript, appended data, and any invisible characters in the text itself. A green Clean or amber Suspicious verdict tells you at a glance whether the file is safe to send.
Because a .docx is really a bundle of parts, scrub even reads text that's been encoded to hide from a simple search — so an invisible character tucked into a paragraph doesn't slip past.
Before you hit send
Run any document you're about to share — a contract, a résumé, a report — through a hidden-content check first. It takes seconds and can save you from leaking a client's name, an internal comment, or your own location. Get scrub free and check a document now.