When you open a document that is hosted in a SharePoint document library in Word 2007, by default the document is shown with its metadata information from the library columns. I was looking for a way to hide this information by default each time I open a document from the server, but couldn’t find where to set this in the available Word Options .
I asked a Word expert at work, Jeremy, who hadn’t come across the issue before, but who obviously is a better googler than myself and he pulled up the solution — it is actually set on the SharePoint side of things, not from within Word. The reason why I couldn’t come up with any relevant google results is that I did not know what this info area was called. Jeremy found this important piece of the puzzle by hovering over the closing x at the top right corner of the panel — it’s called Document Information Panel. So what I need to do is to hide this panel by changing the Document Information Panel settings for a content type(Microsoft detailed instructions).
Here’s a screenshot of the default word behavior:
Hiding the Document Information Panel by default
- Select the Settings menu of the document library
- Under Content Types, click the name of the content type you want to change.
Important: If you don’t have content types enabled, you will not be able to change the settings for the document information panel. If you have them enabled, skip to step 4. - To enable content types, go to Advanced Settings of the library and set the radio button for Allow manage content types? to yes.
- Under Settings, click on the title of the content type you want to modify.
- On the content type’s Settings screen, click Document Information Panel settings.
Content type settings page
- On the Document Information Panel settings page, clear the checkbox for “Always show Document Information Panel on document open…”
document info panel checkbox
Voilà! No more property info when by default when you open the document.
To make the Document Info Panel visible again for the current document in Word, select Prepare>Properties from the Office button:
show document info panel from Prepare menu