Cookie Consent

By clicking “Accept”, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts.

View our Privacy Policy for more information.

How to Redact in Word Document: Follow these Simple Steps

how-to-redact-in-word

In this article, we will get to know about redacting and how you can redact your content in word, and what are some of the other software you can use for redacting your content. 

Content writing for someone comes with responsibility, the content must be accurate, with correct information, factual, concise, and much more. And especially if you are a freelancer, you have to write content for different platforms, different information, and different content.  

While writing we tend to write more and more and forget to remove the information which is not required and that's where Redacting comes in. Redacting is a process of removing personally identifiable information from documents. This is required when private information needs to be taken out of a document before it is given to a third party. 

It gets a little more challenging when you are writing an article that consists of some legal information, for example registering for any law-related content. You have to be very careful and precise while writing.

Problems may occur if an inefficient redaction technique is utilized, such as masking information rather than removing it permanently, or if they are not aware of crucial metadata in a document. They might learn too late that the information contained in the paper can be found later.

But what if I tell you that you have such tools now to remove personal data or sensitive information from articles? And also the good thing is you don't have to download any particular software or something to redact your content.

Do you want to know how?  There is some software that you can use for free of cost and some can be redacted in the word document itself, without any further delay let's find out.

What Is Redacting?

Have you ever written sensitive content for your customers, and forgotten to remove the sensitive content from it? What have you done to get that sorted out?

You would not want to sit all day long to work on the same article, read through it, and do all the corrections right.

So what does Redacting exactly mean?

Redacting is a way through which a text for the reason of safety or legality, censors or hide a portion of a text. It’s an easy concept to understand but it might be a little difficult to implement. 

So for example, there are many simple things, this way of editing and removing information before giving it for publishing or distributing information has a very deep impact on security.

Any type of writing may occasionally be combined, changed, or even censored to make it publication-ready. 

This step, which is closely related to translation because it entails an in-depth analysis of the text, should be carried out with the utmost care to prevent plagiarism, sharing sensitive information, or publishing a text that you'll later regret.

Pros:

  • A more rapid and legal procedure
  • Superior version control
  • Improved consistency and accuracy
  • A safe and supervised setting

There are times when redacting gets failed, because of certain reasons like lack of attention while editing the content. 

Why Is Redacting Important? 

Let’s take a few examples that will give you a better understanding of why redacting is important. The importance of redaction is to understand why it is a crucial activity. 

As per the research, In 2016, the U.S. The Department of Justice came out with an investigation on interference in the Presidential Election. So what happens in the year 2019, the documents were published.  And this document had a lot of information from investigative techniques to jury names in these documents. If it was not for the redaction of the documents, this confidential information would be shared with the public. 

All the names, investigative techniques, and other personal information would be exposed.

Was it fair, don't you think it should have been kept safely?

As an example, its significance in legal documents was demonstrated here, but what about other types of texts? Without redaction, published manuscripts typically contain a large number of errors. Such inaccuracies may even result in the rejection of texts like theses or scientific papers. If you are writing for such companies or such organizations you would have to keep the data secured then how can you redact it? 

Want to know how? Let's find out.

How To Use Redaction In Word?

Most Word documents have private information you may not wish to share. Even if you aren't producing legal, financial, government, or other important business documents, you should still give this some thought. 

Most of us may just need to exclude identifying information, such as our name as the document's author. Your business may have internal rules regarding what to redact if you work in a field that demands a stricter approach. I'll outline many methods for redacting a Word document in this article.

You can remove metadata from a document in Microsoft Word that contains private and secret information. Although it isn't a part of the material and won't be seen in the content, it can still be easily discovered when an electronic copy is sent.

Redacting a Word document aims to conceal text or images and stop others from utilizing tools or methods to "uncover" what is not readily apparent. You may make sure that no one else will be able to see the content you want to hide by following this approach.

You can use these methods easily to redact your important information in a word, let's find out. It won't harm to remove some metadata components before you release a document, unlike what you would think. 

This is where you should start: Start Word's document inspection tool. By doing this, you can get rid of material that you don't want the recipients of the document to see.

Make a copy of the document after it is prepared for distribution, then disseminate it with the redactions. The original should be preserved for historical purposes rather than being distributed. 


Run Word's Inspect Document feature first by doing the following:

  1. On the File tab, click.
  1. In the left pane, choose Info. From the dropdown menu that appears, select Inspect Document under the Check for Issues heading.

  1. Set all the issues you want examined to check in the dialogue that appears, Because it doesn't take long to verify them all, even in a lengthy text, I advise doing so. However, you might just need to check a few errors if you subsequently reinspect the paper.

  1. By selecting the Remove All buttons, resolve any concerns discovered.

  1. Save the copy.

The second way that you can use is:-

Using Word's Replace tool, you may quickly remove sensitive information from the document's content. To do this, use the same copy of the document that you used for the Document Inspector in the previous section.

Simply type [REDACTED] or the word XXXXXXXX in the Find What control after the content you want to remove.

It is a simple operation because you can typically utilize Replace All. You may need to provide the number of characters deleted in some documentation. 

If so, choose the data and look at Word's status bar, which will show you how many characters are present. The replacement string can then include the number.

The third way by generating an image, redact

Taking page-by-page photos of the redacted document file (.docx format) is one of the safest techniques to redact content. Easily distribute screenshots of each page by taking one for each.

The recipients have no chance of electronically disclosing anything in this way. With a lengthy manuscript, this procedure would be laborious.

Restart Word's Document Inspector.

Run the Document Inspector once more after you have thoroughly redacted all of the document's content. It's unlikely to capture anything, but if it does, you'll likely avoid a lot of trouble.

There are other ways as well to redact your content by using this software like:- 

Softwares for Redacting

  1. Wondershare PDF ElementPDFelement

The Wondershare PDFelement - PDF Editor is at the top of the list. Since this tool enables you to completely remove confidential information from your document, redacting PDF files is simple with it. 

Features 

You may edit, redact, combine, convert, and organize your PDF documents using the software's expert features. You may simply redact any part of your PDF document using our redaction tool. 

Annotate, insert, replace, split, merge, add a digital signature, and many other features are among the editing features. Additionally, you can set a password to your PDF file to guard against unwanted access.

Alternatively, you can convert your PDF to a variety of common file types, including Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Images, HTML EPUB, Images (GIF, BMP, JPEG, TIFF, and PNG), and more.

Pricing 

  • Half year plan= $49.99
  • Yearly Plan= $79.99
  • Perpetual Plan= $129.99

  1. Adobe Acrobat 

The redaction tool in Adobe Acrobat Pro is effective for deleting private data from pdf files. The Remove Hidden Information feature of the Adobe software lets you redact sensitive text, photos, and other types of data in addition to producing pdf files.

Features 

Search for and redact particular patterns, phrases, single words, or groups of words.

Redact secret text and information, the document's creator's name, the document's creation date, watermarks, and attachments.

Pricing 

For pricing, you can check the given link

  1. Redactable 

Redact is a platform that you can use to redact your document, with no mistakes and no errors.

You get a free trial for 7 days without a credit card. You are guided through every step of the redaction procedure by simple steps. No need for difficult instructions or training.

Features 

AI workflow boosts efficiency and lowers errors, Easily redact documents in the cloud using any browser, No plugins or downloads are necessary.

Redactable makes it simple for you to set up and work on big redaction projects, from job management to setting up a review procedure. 

To make sure that the reaction is irreversible and impossible to hack, redactable eliminates the metadata and any hidden document components.

Final Thoughts

Redaction is a type of editing that involves removing certain words, phrases, or paragraphs from a physical document without necessarily omitting others. Simply blacking out the sections that need to be censored prevents readers from reading them.

Hence if I give my opinion, Redactable is the top most used software that you can also try and use for your document, With the simple-to-use platform Redactable, private information can be swiftly and effectively removed from documents, giving you the peace of mind that your documents are actually safeguarded. You also get a free trial here.

And the good thing about this is it gives you a free trial to know about the tool more. However at the end of the way you are looking for a tool that completes your work effectively and efficiently.

Redactable is one of the most used tool that can help you to do so. So you don't have to spend hours redacting your content. Because redactable consume that time of yours.

Hence happy and easy working for you.

Ready to get started?

Try Redactable for free and find out why we're the gold standard for redaction
Try for free
Secure icon, green background and white checkmark

No credit card required

Secure icon, green background and white checkmark

Start redacting for free

Secure icon, green background and white checkmark

Cancel any time