Checklist
What to Inspect Before Sharing a Document
Use this checklist before submitting or sharing a PDF, Word document, Excel workbook, or text file.
Start here
Practical, evidence-first guidance
Showing 9–12 of 21 guides
Plain text
What Are Zero-Width Characters and Hidden Unicode Text?
Understand zero-width spaces, bidirectional controls, homoglyphs, mixed scripts, and other invisible Unicode characters in text.
Learning lab
How to Use the Educational Sample Lab
Learn document inspection with safe synthetic PDF, Word, Excel, and text samples, expected findings, benign explanations, and verification exercises.
Word
Check Word Metadata, Comments and Hidden Text
Upload a DOCX, follow a safe worked example, and review metadata, comments and tracked changes with Hidden Word Scanner and Microsoft Document Inspector.
Use findings as a starting point
Automated inspection can surface evidence that deserves attention, but it cannot determine a person’s intent or guarantee that every hidden element was found. Verify important findings in the source document and preserve the original file when documenting a concern.