Removing / Erasing Metadata

GOFR has a very quick and easy automated process to remove / erase / clean out all text metadata fields from your documents (in addition to updating them, see general help on document properties here).

To remove metadata, please follow these steps.

1. Click on the “Find & Replace Metadata” button in step 3 on the main screen in GOFR.
2. Click on the button “Erase Metadata” at the top of the “Metadata Center” screen.
3. Click on the “Save And Close” button at the top of the “Metadata Center” screen.
4. Select the output folder for your documents in the main screen step 4.
5. Click on the button “Perform Substitutions or Extractions” in the main screen.

That’s it! You have erased the metadata in all your input documents.

What “Erase Metadata” does

Clicking this button will automatically insert all relevant regular expression entries (in the tab labeled “Find/Replace/Update Metadata”) to erase all metadata from your documents. Each entry finds .* (any value) in one property and replaces it with nothing. The entries replace any find replace operations and quick updates you entered before.

After processing all the documents in the main screen these entries will remove ALL metadata fields except date fields. Date fields must be handled very carefully, and may not be automatically removed with regular expressions. To remove a date field, update it in the “By MS Office Document” tab and follow the date format to update it. See further comments below.

Review the entries in the “Find/Replace/Update Metadata” tab, and remove any that may not be necessary.

Date format comments

Date fields have the UTC format as follows (example):

2017-06-19T15:09:00Z

Make sure to enter the date in the above format. Care must be taken to enter the date in the correct format. The software will perform an update to whatever is in the text to replace field; if it does not conform to the UTC format, Word/Excel/PowerPoint will complain when you open the document.