4 Ways on How To Redact in Word [Step-by-Step Guide]
Summary :
To prevent privacy leakage, it is quite important to hide or delete some sensitive and confidential information when sharing Word documents. And what should be the specific way of operation? This article will provide you with a detailed description of how to redact in Word in the steps.
How To Redact in Word
For confidential documents, financial information, personal information, and other sensitive text or images, you need some editing operations to make others not see these messages. For documents with less content, you can manually redact to directly hide or overwrite. And for documents with many pages, you can redact them by automatic find and remove operations. If you are looking for a solution, please read on to learn more.
Some Solutions You May Also Need: How To Black Out Text in a PDF Online/Offline, Secure Your Information with Bluebeam: The Ultimate Redaction Solution
What is Redaction
Redaction allows you to hide, obscure, blackout, or delete sensitive and confidential text or images from a document to avoid information leakage. However, sometimes incorrect use or manipulation by the editor can lead to confidential disclosure.
How To Redact in Word Automatically
When editing Word documents, Microsoft Word is the first thing that comes to your mind. This professional tool for working with Word documents can help you edit, convert, and translate documents. For redacting text, Microsoft Word provides an automated solution that allows you to do your work in Word redact text efficiently.
Step 1. Open Word in Microsoft Word. Click “File-Info-Inspect Document”, confirm what you need to inspect in the pop-up box (usually no need to change the default options), and then click “Inspect” in the bottom right corner.
Open Document Inspector in Microsoft Word
Step 2. After completing the automatic inspection, you can find a “Document Properties and Personal Information” marked with a red exclamation mark, click “Remove Click “Remove All” to remove all the privacy information.
Click “Remove All” To Remove All Private Information
Step 3. Save the redacted file, if you want to keep the original file, you can choose “Save as” to save a copy of the redacted file.
How To Redact in Word Manually
For some information that may not be removed by automatic recognition, you need to complete the text by you manually. Here are three different ways to Redact in Word Manually for your reference.
Redact By Replacing the Text
Using the “find and replace” tool in Microsoft Word, you can quickly complete the text redacting. Here are the specific steps to explain the operation.
Step 1. Open Word and locate the “Replace” tool in the upper right corner or use the keyboard shortcut “Ctrl+H” to summon the Find and Replace tool pop-up window.
Use the Find and Replace Tool in Microsoft Word
Step 2. Type the text you need to replace in the “Find what” input box and type something like “xxx” or “REDACTED” in the “Replace with” input box. It is to identify and overwrite the original text to prevent the disclosure of confidentiality. Click “Replace All” to redact information.
Replacing Sensitive Information in Microsoft Word
Step 3. To make sure everything is safe or prevent others from tracking your modified text through some technical means, you can convert Word into a non-editable PDF document. Click “File-Save As”, in the “Save as type” drop-down box, select “PDF”, and then click “Save”.
Save Word as PDF via Microsoft Word
Alternatively, you can also use PDFgear online Word-to-PDF converter to complete Word-to-PDF conversion with high quality and without formatting loss.
Convert Word to PDF by PDFgear
Redact By Hiding the Text
Redact by Hiding the Text is also a good way. You can make other people can’t see your hidden information when you open the file again.
Step 1. Open word and select the text you want to hide by dragging the mouse.
Step 2. Locate the “Front” ribbon at the top and check “Hidden” in “Effects” to redact the text.
Hide Text via Microsoft Word
Unhide the Text Function
Redact By Converting Word to Picture
If you need to share Word with others, you can convert the Word document to a non-editable Picture and then send it.
Step 1. Open word and locate the highlighting function, then select the black color and outline the text that needs to be hidden.
Black Out Text Using Microsoft Word
Step 2. Save Word as a PDF file.
Step 3. Upload the PDF to PDFgear online PDF to JPG converter to convert PDF to picture, so that you can completely prevent the leakage of confidential information and do not have to fear that others trace the way to recover data.
Convert PDF to Picture in PDFgear
Blacking text by highlighting to achieve the effect of hidden only for the case of black text. If your text is in other colors, you need to change the text color before highlighting.
FAQs
How Do You Make a Word Redacted?
The easiest way to redact in word is to use Microsoft Word’s Document Inspector tool to automate the removal process. You just need to click “File > Info > Inspect Document > Inspect > Remove All” to complete the operation.
Can I Redact a PDF in Word?
For PDF documents, you can first use PDFgear PDF to Word online converter to convert its format and then open through Microsoft Word, navigate to the “Find and Replace” tool, and all sensitive words will be replaced by REDACTED or XXXX.
How Do I Black Out Text in a Word Document?
To simply black out a Word document just use the highlighting tool. Navigate to the highlight button in the “Front” ribbon, select black as the highlighter color in the chroma card, and drag the text to black out with the mouse.
To Sum Up
It is not easy to find private information or sensitive words in cryptic words. But so far you know four ways that work well. Of course, to prevent some people from tracking your editing changes through technical means, it is safer to convert the ciphered word to PDF or image directly. Then you can use the free file converter, PDFgear. PDFgear online tools are very convenient and if you do not want to have the number of files and size restrictions, Install PDFgear offline desktop applications will be more in line with your needs.
