Microsoft is killing off a feature in Office 2003 that the company said helped save time, but also ran the risk of exposing confidential information.

As part of Service Pack 3 of Office 2003, which will be available Tuesday as a free download from Microsoft’s Web site, Microsoft is disabling Word 2003’s “fast save” feature, which works by saving the changes made since the last save, rather than rewriting the whole document to disk.

“While the Fast Save feature speeds up the document-saving process by saving only the changes made to a document, the saved document may contain metadata, such as comments, erased text, previous versions, and authorship,” Microsoft said in a white paper on the update. “Disabling Fast Save ensures that confidential data is protected against improper disclosure.”