Excel XLSX Metadata Editor

View and edit metadata in Excel XLSX files: title, author, subject, keywords, company, manager. Strip personal information before sharing spreadsheets. Sheet structure is preserved.

1.0.0
Version
Auth
Batch

About Excel XLSX Metadata Editor

Every Excel workbook carries a hidden manifest — author pulled from your Office profile, company from your Office install, lastModifiedBy showing whoever last touched the file, plus extended properties about edit time, sheet titles and template paths. For an internal team workbook this is fine; for a financial model going to a client, a budget sent to opposing counsel during litigation, an NDA-bound deck of numbers or a public-records release, these fields are a real privacy leak. Excel's own Document Inspector covers it, but requires having Excel installed and removes everything in one blunt sweep.

This Excel XLSX metadata editor does the targeted version — view every property, edit any subset to specific values, and download a fresh .xlsx with the new metadata baked in. 15 core fields (title, subject, creator, keywords, description, lastModifiedBy, revision, category, contentStatus, language, version, identifier, created, modified, lastPrinted) and 7 extended fields (Application, AppVersion, Company, Manager, Template, TotalTime, DocSecurity) are individually addressable. Fields are whitelisted server-side so a hand-crafted JSON payload can't inject arbitrary XML, and only docProps/core.xml and docProps/app.xml are touched — sheets, formulas, charts, pivot tables, embedded images and the HeadingPairs / TitlesOfParts sheet- structure index stay byte-identical to the original.

Use it to anonymise a financial model before sending to a client, scrub a budget worksheet before submitting in litigation, sanitise a template before publishing it to a downloads page, replace the placeholder author with the right name after a content-team handoff, or audit which spreadsheet library a downloaded workbook was generated by. Files up to 25 MB.

Excel XLSX Metadata Editor Use Cases

  • Finance teams scrubbing creator and lastModifiedBy before sending models to clients
  • Legal departments anonymising budget worksheets before submission in litigation
  • Job seekers cleaning author from CV-attached portfolios before recruiter uploads
  • Consultants replacing in-house author names with client names on deliverable workbooks
  • Marketers stripping internal Company metadata from publicly-downloadable templates
  • Compliance officers auditing what hidden info sits in a workbook before public release
  • Forensic analysts checking which spreadsheet library generated a downloaded file

Excel XLSX Metadata Editor Features

  • Edit 15 core properties (title, subject, creator, keywords, description, lastModifiedBy, revision, language, dates) one at a time
  • Edit 7 extended properties (Application, AppVersion, Company, Manager, Template, TotalTime, DocSecurity)
  • Server-side whitelist on every field — hand-crafted JSON cannot inject arbitrary XML elements into docProps
  • Only docProps/core.xml and docProps/app.xml are touched — sheets, formulas, charts, pivot tables stay byte-identical
  • HeadingPairs and TitlesOfParts (the OOXML sheet-structure index) preserved verbatim so Excel's sheet-count summary stays accurate
  • Extract action shows the current values without modifying the file so you can audit before deciding what to change
  • Files up to 25 MB processed in a stateless serverless function and discarded immediately after the response

How to Use Excel XLSX Metadata Editor

Upload your .xlsx file

Drag-and-drop or click to select an Excel .xlsx workbook (up to 25 MB). Works on .xlsx from any Excel version (2007 onward), Google Sheets export, LibreOffice Calc and Numbers export — they all use the same OOXML container.

Extract to see current metadata

Click Extract. The current core and extended properties are read from docProps/core.xml and docProps/app.xml and shown in a table. The most common author leak comes from the creator field; the most common company leak from Company and Manager.

Edit the fields you want to change

Type new values into the editable fields, or clear a value to remove it. Leave any field blank or unchanged to keep the original. Each field is independent — change author without touching the dates, or vice versa.

Click Update

The workbook is repacked with the new metadata and the sheet content, formulas, charts and pivot tables unchanged. The HeadingPairs and TitlesOfParts indices are preserved so Excel's sheet-count summary stays accurate in the rewritten file.

Download and verify

Download the rewritten .xlsx. Open it in Excel's File → Info pane, in Numbers, or in Google Sheets to confirm the metadata changes landed. The cell values, formulas and charts will be identical to the original.

Excel XLSX Metadata Editor FAQ

No. Only the two XML parts docProps/core.xml and docProps/app.xml inside the .xlsx package are rewritten. Sheet XML files (each sheet's cells and formulas), shared strings, styles, themes, embedded images, charts, pivot tables and the HeadingPairs/TitlesOfParts sheet-structure indices stay byte-identical. Open the rewritten workbook alongside the original in Excel and recalculate — every cell value matches.

Core (15): title, subject, creator, keywords, description, lastModifiedBy, revision, category, contentStatus, language, version, identifier, created, modified, lastPrinted. Extended (7): Application, AppVersion, Company, Manager, Template, TotalTime, DocSecurity. Custom properties and cell-comment authors are not currently exposed — for full inspector parity, use Excel's built-in Document Inspector after this pass.

25 MB. This covers most workbooks including ones with embedded images, charts and dozens of sheets. Very large workbooks (financial models with thousands of rows of intermediate data, BI exports) can exceed 25 MB — either compress the embedded media in Excel first, or use openpyxl in a local script for arbitrary sizes.

Document Inspector is all-or-nothing — it removes every category of personal info you tick and runs only inside Excel. This tool is field-level: you can keep the Company name but change the Author, or replace the Manager without touching the dates. Useful when you want to set new metadata for the recipient (their name as creator) rather than wipe everything to defaults. Run Document Inspector afterwards if you also want to strip cell comments and hidden rows.

Yes. Excel computes the sheet count and titles summary (visible in File → Info) from docProps/app.xml's HeadingPairs and TitlesOfParts blocks — both are preserved verbatim through the rewrite. Editing the creator or company name leaves the sheet structure completely intact.

Yes, to a stateless serverless function — rewriting the .xlsx package needs a real ZIP/XML pipeline that doesn't run cleanly in the browser. The file is deleted immediately after the response and nothing is logged to durable storage. For absolute paranoia, openpyxl (pip install openpyxl) does this locally in a few lines without any transit.

No — cell comments, named ranges, defined formulas and every in-sheet artefact live in separate XML parts that are deliberately preserved here. If you need to strip cell comments along with metadata before sharing externally, run Excel's Document Inspector after this metadata pass, or use openpyxl to script the additional clean-up.

Drop your .xlsx file here or click to upload

Excel workbooks only • Max 25MB

Excel XLSX Metadata Editor Tutorial

Why edit XLSX metadata?

Excel workbooks carry hidden metadata: author name, company, last modified by, even the original template. When you share a spreadsheet with a client or post it online, all of that goes with it.

  • Privacy: Strip your name and company before sharing externally
  • Whitelabel: Replace internal author info with your client's name
  • Compliance: Finance and HR teams often require metadata cleanup before delivery
  • Forensics protection: Avoid leaking who edited a workbook and when

How does it work?

An .xlsx file is just a ZIP archive containing XML files. The metadata lives in docProps/core.xml (Dublin Core fields) and docProps/app.xml (Office-specific fields). This tool reads those XML files, lets you edit the values, and rebuilds the .xlsx with the new metadata. Sheet contents and structure are never touched — even sheet names (HeadingPairs / TitlesOfParts) are preserved verbatim.

Editable fields

Core properties (Dublin Core):

  • title, subject, creator (author)
  • keywords, description (comments)
  • lastModifiedBy, revision
  • created, modified dates (W3CDTF)
  • category, contentStatus, language

Extended properties (Office-specific):

  • Application, AppVersion
  • Company, Manager, Template
  • TotalTime (minutes spent editing)
  • DocSecurity (0=none, 1=password, 2=read-only rec, 4=read-only enforced)

Sheet names, links, and shared-doc flags are read-only — they're tied to the workbook structure and editing them would corrupt the file.