Data collection summary for Office - December 2019

Published: December 2019

Important

The information in this article applies to:

Version 1904 or later of the desktop versions of Access, Excel, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, Publisher, and Word.
Version 1904 or later of the desktop versions of Project and Visio that come with some subscription plans, such as the Project Online Professional plan or Visio Online Plan 2.
Version 16.28 or later of the following Office for Mac applications: Excel, Outlook, OneNote, PowerPoint, and Word.
Version 1908 of Semi-Annual Channel (Targeted), which was released on September 10, 2019, and will be available in Semi-Annual Channel in January 2020.
Version 2.30 and later of the iOS versions of Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint, and Word, as well as Version 1.17 and later of Visio Viewer for iOS.

Overview

Microsoft is always looking to give customers increased transparency and control over their data. As part of this work, we are moving our major products and services to a model where the categories of personal data collected from customer devices will be classified as either Required or Optional. We believe this will provide our customers with a simpler experience – information should be easier to find, easier to understand, and easier to act on through the tools we provide. To that end, this article explains the categories of personal data that the Office applications listed above collect and provides information about controls you can use to tailor the data that Microsoft collects.

Required data

Data in the required category consists of data that enables our products and services to work as expected and to keep them up to date, secure, and performing properly. This data may be collected either from client applications or from connected experiences as described below.

The required data collected from client applications is required diagnostic data. Examples include information about the version of Office installed on the device or include information that indicates that Office applications are crashing when trying to open documents. Details of the required diagnostic data collected by Office applications are available in this article: Required diagnostic data for Office.

Office consists of client software applications and connected experiences designed to enable you to create, communicate, and collaborate more effectively. Working with others on a document stored on OneDrive for Business or translating the contents of a Word document into a different language are examples of connected experiences. To enable these connected experiences, required service data is collected.

Required service data is crucial because it enables us to deliver these cloud-based connected experiences and help keep them secure, up to date and performing properly. Three types of information make up required service data:

Customer content, which is content you create using Office, such as text typed in a Word document, and is used in conjunction with the connected experience.
Functional data, which includes information needed by a connected experience to perform its task, such as configuration information about the app.
Service diagnostic data, which is the data necessary to keep the service secure, up to date, and performing as expected. Because this data is strictly related to the connected experience, it is separate from required or optional diagnostic data.

More information about required service data can be found in this article: Required service data for Office.

In some cases, you can control whether required data is collected by deciding whether to use the product features or functions that depend on that required data. For example, if an enterprise customer uses Office 365 with document storage and collaboration in the cloud, we will collect the data required to keep an employee’s documents secure and synced across all her devices. In addition, consumer users may choose which of the following types of connected experiences to enable when working in Office applications. For users working in an enterprise setting, these controls are managed by the company administrator, and are unavailable to the enterprise end user.

Experiences that analyze your content use your Office content to provide you with design recommendations, editing suggestions, data insights, and similar features. For example, PowerPoint Designer or Editor in Word.
Experiences that download online content allow you to search and download online content including templates, images, 3D models, videos, and reference materials to enhance your documents. For example, Office templates or PowerPoint QuickStarter.

Consumer users (or administrators in the enterprise setting) can turn off all connected experiences, which will also turn off other connected experiences, such as document co-authoring and online file storage. If this setting is chosen certain Office functionality will remain available, such as synching your mailbox in Outlook, using Teams or Skype for Business, as well as certain essential services described in this article: Essential services for Office.

More information about connected experiences can be found in this article: Connected experiences in Office.

We focus on creating controls over features and functions that make sense for our customers and are always open to feedback on what might work better for you. We are working on providing additional configuration options that will give you more control over the collection of data that is required for certain features or functions.

Required diagnostic data in Office includes the following data categories. More information and examples can be found in this article: Required diagnostic data for Office.

Data Category	Description	Examples
Device connectivity and configuration	This type of Required diagnostic data includes details about the device, its configuration, and connectivity capabilities.	Details on a user's video card driver that has caused multiple recent crashes of Office applications, so that Office may stop using this video card (using software rendering instead) until the driver is updated. Diagnostic information about the user's internet connection to understand how that may impact connectivity to Office services.
Product and service performance	This type of Required diagnostic data includes details about device or service health and performance.	The event that captures graceful and ungraceful app exits for further investigation. The event that indicates an add-in crash, collecting why it crashed in the case it is related to the Office add-in sandbox. Collection of which feature is being used should PowerPoint ungracefully exit. E.g., slide show, document open, save, edit, co-authoring, or shutdown.
Product and service usage	This type of Required diagnostic data includes details about the usage of the device, operating system, applications, and services.	The event used for capturing authentication token generation failures during an In-app purchase in Office for Mac. Events generated to determine if a file was successfully opened or saved. The result of adding an account in Outlook using the “new account configuration” experience.
Software setup and inventory	This type of Required diagnostic data includes software installation and update information on the device.	An event used to ensure new users can successfully launch and run OneNote for the first time and that ensures critical regression detection for OneNote. Information about the runtime behavior of custom add-in functions in Excel that counts execution attempts, successful completions, infrastructure errors, and user code errors.

Optional connected experiences

Office offers several optional connected experiences to enterprise end users that are not covered by an enterprise organization’s license with Microsoft. These cloud-backed services can be used at the discretion of the enterprise customer and are not part of the Office SKU. They are provided under the terms of the Microsoft Services Agreement and privacy statement. Enterprise administrators may choose to provide these services to their end users, and the end user may also choose to enable them for use. Consumer users can access and control these services as a part of the connected experiences controls described above. More information about optional connected experiences can be found in this article: Overview of optional connected experiences in Office.

Optional data

Data in the optional category is not essential to the product or service experience, and consumer users can control the collection of optional data independently from choosing to use specific product features or functions. For users working in an enterprise setting, these controls are managed by the company administrator, and are unavailable to the end user. We enable you to decide whether to allow such collection during Office setup. We also make it easy for you to change your mind about optional data collection after initial Office setup on your devices. Examples of optional data include data we collect about the shapes people are inserting into Word documents to provide better image options and about the time it takes for a PowerPoint slide to appear on your screen so we can improve the experience if it’s slow. We think there are compelling reasons for you to share this optional data, because it makes it easier for us to troubleshoot issues and creates the opportunity for new or improved experiences, but we want you to understand what is happening and to have the opportunity to make this choice for yourself. More information about optional diagnostic data can be found in this article: Optional diagnostic data for Office.

When you choose to send optional diagnostic data, it includes more detailed information than what is collected with required diagnostic data as described above. Required diagnostic data will always be included if you choose to send optional diagnostic data. Optional diagnostic data in Office includes the following data categories. More information and examples can be found in this article: Optional diagnostic data for Office.

Data Category	Description	Examples
Device connectivity and configuration	This type of Optional diagnostic data includes details about the device, its configuration, and connectivity capabilities.	Rendering failures coming from the graphics rendering engine. Information about the user’s network connection and speed.
Product and service performance	This type of Optional diagnostic data includes details about device or service health and performance.	The performance of a document save activity by Word. When a user signs into an Azure Active Directory account, sending app name, version, and error code if the event failed.
Product and service usage	This type of Optional diagnostic data includes details about the usage of the device, operating system, applications, and services	An indication that Word has executed the command to highlight text. A heartbeat to indicate that the translator feature has been loaded and rendered successfully
Software setup and inventory	This type of Optional diagnostic data includes software installation and update information on the device.	Whether Word successfully updates the Ribbon in the Word User Interface when the user changes their identity. Information about the Office add-in that the user has installed, including app ID, operating system build and version,

Privacy controls and information

Microsoft provides the Diagnostic Data viewer to enable you to see what diagnostic data is being collected while you use Office, for both required and optional diagnostic data.

Microsoft offers users with choices about how their data is collected. Click on the links below to learn more about the data that Microsoft collects and the controls available to consumer users, enterprise system administrators, and enterprise end users.

For versions of Office prior to those listed at the top of this article, privacy settings are described in View my privacy options in the Microsoft Office Trust Center.