Do You Accidentally E-mail Private Data in Office Docs?

If you've ever had one of those embarrasing 'whoops' moments where you realize - or worse, are told - that you accidentally e-mailed a Word, Excel or PowerPoint document that contained tracked changes, comments or other info that your recipient shouldn't have seen, a new Outlook add-on can help.

I recently looked at SendShield, a download for Outlook, that scans Office 2003 and 2007 documents for this kind of data when you attach one to an Outlook e-mail.  If it finds any, you can quickly clean out the tracked changes, comments or other info before sending the file.  SendShield only changes the attached copy of the file, and leaves the original untouched.

It's free for now while it's in beta, but will likely carry a cost when the developers, Unedged Software, finish it in a month or two. I asked, but Unedged couldn't tell me what that cost might be.

The tool worked well in my testing, and I can think of plenty of times when I've turned off viewing tracked changes in a Word doc so I could get a clean final read, and forgot they were there until a co-worker told me I had just e-mailed a file with them still in the doc. 

It's important to note that since the download is still in beta, it may contain bugs. I didn't run into any myself, but the company warns that some may result in data loss.  Also, it only works with Office 2003 and 2007 for now, though support for 2000 and XP is on the way.

For some more info and a download link, head over to the SendShield Downloads page.