Professionally Redact Confidential Information in Word Documents

If you've ever had to edit a document to purge corporate confidential or personally identifiable information, you know it's not a fun exercise. You either need to edit the document by deleting the data outright -- and that means rewriting it so it still makes grammatical sense -- or getting fancy with Word's formatting tools to overwrite the redacted bits.

I've got a better solution: A free Word add-on that is designed expressly to redact text, and it gives your documents a sort-of-CIA-like professional appearance.

Indeed, the Word 2007 Redaction Tool marks out text so thoroughly that it makes your ordinary documents look like you're covering up the flying saucer crash at Roswell.

It's a standard add-on for Word 2007, so after you install it, the redaction tool appears in the Review tab. You can select text and "mark it" for redaction, or search and replace the entire document for words or phrases to mark. When you're done, redact the document and the tool creates a new version of your file with all the redacted text thoroughly removed (the original file is undamaged).

All the text is converted to unrelated characters and is then covered in a black highlight, so recipients can't reconstruct the data even with a copy of the file. The tool recommends, though, that you also inspect the document to make sure any related metadata is also removed.