Sharepoint Online injects MS Office documents with custom property fields

Question

Dear Microsoft 365 Community,

We discovered that MS Office documents in our environment get automatically injected with custom property fields (see screenshot below) when they are uploaded to any SharePoint Online site, including Teams and OneDrive.

This is not a desired configuration and is sometimes causing issues with saving and synchronising files. We have no idea how these fields got created or who did it.

With "test tag" 2 and 4, when clicking the symbol on the far-right side, we can select various Term Sets, which seem to come from SharePoint Online Term Store.

Tag 3 shows no choice and 'Test tag' (without any number) is defined as a mandatory field but does not allow any input. Once a user accidently clicks on this field, the document cannot be saved anymore, because Word expects this mandatory field to be filled.

So far, we could not find an option to edit or remove these fields either in Word or SharePoint Online.

How can we remove those undesired fields/properties and stop SharePoint Online from injecting them? I'm aware the Term Store is intended to add metadata to documents, but we could not find any option to adjust/create/delete those test tags.

Best regards

Thomas

Answer 1

Per my knowledge, this is a designed SharePoint procedure, it cannot be changed by users. So, custom properties for SharePoint files cannot be removed in the Microsoft word.

Every file be saved from Microsoft word into document library should in keeping with settings in the SharePoint document library. If you set required property in the SharePoint document library, the required property should be filled in the Microsoft word.

For the issue that cannot choose term in the managed metadata column, check the term is available for tagging.*************************************************************************

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