Redaction of documents that contain sensitive or confidential information is key to every individual, ranging from a sole proprietor to government agencies. No one likes it when their private or confidential information falls into the wrong hands. This practice is also common among lawyers. However, redacting a Word document is not easy and most people have made mistakes in the past. Using wrong methods to redact your document will lead to the leakage of your confidential information. Some of the wrong methods that most people use are things like deleting, changing the font to white, and blacking out text with comment tools. Another mistake that people make is using outdated programs to redact their documents. In this article, we shall take you through a step-by-step guide on how to redact in Word document.

Part 1. How to Perform Redaction in Word
Part 2. How to Perform Redaction in PDF

Part 1How to Redact a Word Document

Before you distribute your documents to others or to the public in general, it is important that you hide some information that is private or confidential. Below are steps showing how to completely redact text in Word document. This method applies to Word 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016.

Note: Redacting Word document is permanent and cannot be undone. If you wish to still access the information that you want to remove, it is advisable that you make a copy of your document before you redact your document.

Open your word document that you want to redact.
Bring up the backstage view by clicking File.
Go to Info, then Check for Issues and click Inspect Document.

On the Document Inspector dialog that appears, select (check) the options available on the list that you wish to inspect.
Click Inspect, once the inspection is complete, click Remove All to remove all the inspected text or elements from your document.

With the above simple steps, your Word document will be successfully redacted. You can now share or distribute the document to the public without any worry of sharing private information.

Part 2Best PDF Redaction Tool for Redacting in PDF Files

What is the best redaction software that you can use to redact a PDF document? Wondershare PDFelement is the best program that you can use.

Free Download

Redact text, images and pages in a PDF to permanently remove any private, sensitive, or confidential data before distributing your files.
Edit you PDF text as well as images just as you would do on a Word document. Extract, add, delete, reorganize, rotate, and crop PDF pages easily.
Create, edit and fill out PDF forms using a number of options.
Annotate your document by highlighting some texts, adding sticky notes or comment boxes, and drawing free-hand markups.
Convert PDF to Excel, Word, PowerPoint, HTML, EPUP, Images and RTF etc.
Use OCR to transform scanned PDF documents to editable file without any change in the documents’ original format and layout.