Metadata—information about a particular document—was one of the surprises that has come back to haunt Merck in its Vioxx mess. Information that Merck employees thought they had deleted was in fact forwarded to a leading medical journal. Now Microsoft, in a forthcoming release of its operating system, will be taking steps to ensure that less visible data in documents can be deleted. Indiana’s Journal-Gazette reports that Microsoft has always made it possible for users to erase metadata before documents were disseminated. But the steps to do that are often cumbersome or obscure. Microsoft hopes to resolve that in part by adding a metadata scan as a generic “file” option in not-yet-released office programs.