Experts left and right have been currently talking about the buzz word, which is metadata cataloguing. However, one lament of these experts is that metadata cataloguing is not as generally known in the wider public circles as it should be, unlike in circles that are composed of people in the know. Simply put, metadata is all about information that pops up in different programs such as Microsoft Powerpoint, Word and Excel.
It is the information that exists about the given information your electronic documents already have – and most probably contain a lot of. These metadata are usually some descriptions about the attributes of a document like its title, author, location, date it was created and its content. When you catalogue using metadata, these types of information or attributes are indeed very helpful. However, metadata can also be used to share some confidential and some potentially embarrassing information with an audience you might not wish to pay heed to.
As it is, you would probably not want a prospective customer of yours to find out the historical context of the data regarding an original author from a file you have sent to them. It is like a tracking of the number of revisions, who did who and what during what period of time. So in order to keep your metadata cataloguing safe and sound, you may choose to transfer these into pdf formations using a pdf creator before you complete it and send the whole thing to the person who was requesting for it.