Visibility of Word 2007 custom properties in windows explorer

Topic

New Reply

I have doc and docx documents with a custom properties added as flag holders
I want to see these without opening the file (for troubleshooting when the file has been closed)

I can see (and amend) the custom properties of a doc file in explorer by rt click>properties>custom tab but when I do this with the docx file there’s no custom tab and I can’t find them anywhere else

Anyone help?

Reply | Quote

Replies

No help, but just to confirm, I get the same results when I try this with Word 2007 (on Windows XP), as well as with Word 2010 (on Windows 7).

Gary

Reply | Quote

Apparently the Windows program group responsible for Windows Explorer has never gotten the message that the Office team changed the file format about 5 years ago. Explorer still doesn’t have any code that look inside the XML-based docx files and retrieve custom properties from it. Peter Jamieson summed it up pretty well in his post from 2009, and nothing has changed since then.

If you’re willing to use PowerShell (which comes with Windows Vista and Windows 7, and is available for download for Windows XP), you can use a script posted on the Hey Scripting Guy blog. Essentially, the script starts Word in an invisible window, uses it to open the document and grab the custom properties, and prints them in the PowerShell window. For general use, it would have to be modified to get the path and filename of the document you want to examine (the code in the post uses a hardcoded path and filename).

Reply | Quote