Word 2007 Redaction Tool – Hide Confidential Data in Word Document

When sharing documents to public, you may need to delete those personal confidential information. The traditional way to do this is to search for the data and then remove them manually which could be quite troublesome and time consuming. If you are always dealing with such situation, Word 2007 Redaction Tool is probably a great tool for you that can be used to hide text within Microsoft Office Word documents easily and much more efficiently.

Word 2007 Redaction Tool is a freeware and works as an add-in for Microsoft Office Word. It can be used to mark and replace text with black bar so that the confidential data will not able to read by anyone else while sharing the whole document. Once you have installed it, Redact group will be added under Review tab.

To redact text, at first you need to mark the text by highlighting the text and hit on Mark button. Alternatively, you can use Find and Mark function to find for the specific text and mark it. You can use Previous or Next button to locate to the text you have marked within the document for final checking. Secondly, you can now replace the marked text with black bar by clicking Mark -> Redact Document. A new redacted version document will be created with marked text replaced by black bar and you will be asked to run Document Inspector to check and remove any hidden metadata within the document before it is distributed. Then click on Inspect button to inspect it, or else click Close button.

For the newly created redacted document, you will not able to convert it back to original text anymore. However, for the original document, you can unmark all text you have marked previously by going to Unmark -> Remove All Marks.

Word 2007 Redaction Tool version 1.1 is absolutely free to download and works well for Word 2007 and Word 2010. Hopefully this tool will become handy for you to keep your confidential data private before sharing the whole document.