Get this ready to send safely — free.
Before you send a spreadsheet outside your company — to a client, a partner, or the public — it can leak personal data, hidden rows and sheets, internal file paths, your name and company buried in the file’s history, or private notes. Upload it once: we scan all six, clean the ones that are safe to clean, and show you the rest so you decide before you download.
The six leak vectors
Sending a workbook can expose more than the numbers you meant to share. This check looks at all six at once: personal data (emails, phone numbers, IDs, card and bank numbers), the file’s own document properties (author, company, revision history), internal notes left in cell comments, hidden sheets a recipient can simply unhide, external links and file paths that point at your network shares or local drives, and macros that a recipient’s security may flag.
What we clean, and what’s your call
Four of the six are safe to clean automatically, so we do — in a fresh copy: personal data is masked, identifying document properties are cleared, internal cell comments are removed, and any VBA macros are stripped. Macros get removed because a macro-enabled file is routinely blocked by the recipient’s security — and we tell you plainly that we did it: your original still has them, so if the recipient genuinely needs the macros, send them the original instead. The other two are yours to decide: hidden sheets and external links can be legitimate, so we never delete them silently. We report exactly what’s there, in plain language, and you choose whether to remove them in Excel before sending.
The before→after ledger is the point
Nothing happens quietly. You get a category-by-category breakdown — what was found, how much of it, and where — split into “we handled this for you” and “you should look at this.” The masked personal values are never echoed back to the page, so nothing can re-leak through this tool.
Know its limits
Personal-data detection is pattern-based: it reliably catches things with a recognizable shape, but not names or free-text personal details written in prose. Hidden rows and columns inside a sheet aren’t auto-flagged either. The ledger says so plainly — open the safe copy and scan it yourself before you share it.
Your original file is safe
The page reads your file in memory, cleans a copy, and hands that copy back. Your uploaded
.xlsx is never changed and never stored — nothing is ever lost.
Enforce this on every file, automatically
You just safety-checked one file by hand. If files leave your store, pipeline, or team on a regular
basis, your AI agent can run this exact same pre-send check on every one of them before it goes out —
no upload, no browser, right where the file is generated. Install
xlsx-for-ai and connect it over
MCP, then ask Claude or Cursor to “make this workbook safe to send.” The agent calls the same
xlsx_redact that powers this page and gets the full JSON manifest back, so a pre-send
safety gate becomes one step in your own workflow instead of a thing someone has to remember to do.
npm install -g xlsx-for-ai
All Get this ready to send safely — free. guides
- Are hidden rows gone when you email an Excel file? (No — here's why)
- Check a spreadsheet before uploading or posting it online
- Check what's hidden in a spreadsheet before you send it (Document Inspector)
- Clean an Excel file before emailing to a client or boss
- Clear version history in Excel (OneDrive / SharePoint files)
- Delete all comments and notes from Excel before sharing
- Hidden rows and columns — can the recipient see them?
- Hidden sheets in Excel — what they are and how to find them
- Hidden sheets that don't show up in the Unhide menu ("very hidden" sheets)
- Old deleted data hiding in an Excel pivot table (pivot cache)
- Remove external links and data connections from Excel
- Remove the "last modified by" name from an Excel file
- Remove tracked changes and edit history before sending
- Remove your company name and email from Excel file properties
- Remove your name from an Excel file (author / document properties)
- Strip macros out of a spreadsheet before emailing
- What does someone see when they receive your Excel file? (hidden metadata)
- What "Inspect Document" actually checks and removes (plain English)