Microsoft Word 2003 Redaction Tool

Redaction is the editing of a document to remove confidential information. Using this free add-on for Word, you can mark sections of your documents for redaction. You can then create another redacted version of the document that will hide the marked text. Confidential legal documents, insurance contracts and other confidential government documents are often redacted before they are made public.

Earlier this year, the U.S. military used the black highlighter feature in Microsoft Word to cover the sensitive material and then converted the document to PDF format. The general public was able to easily uncover the black highlighted text to reveal sensitive text. With this new redaction tool, all of us, including our military will be able to better protect sensitive documents.

What Can and Cannot Be Redacted?

The Redaction tool supports the redaction of text in:

– The body of your document
– Tables
– Headers
– Footers
– Endnotes
– Footnotes
– Fields
– Table of Contents
– Table of Authorities
– Index
– Table of Figures

The Redaction tool does not support redaction of:

– Graphics
– Comments
– Content in textboxes or frames

Creating a Redacted Document

To use this tool, select a word, sentence, or a paragraph that needs to be redacted. On the Redaction toolbar, click Mark. You’ll notice that the selection is shaded Gray-25%. Click Redact Document on the Readcation toolbar and you’ll see the following message.

Click Yes and the redacted selection will be shown as blacked out text in a new redacted document. Now you can save this new document for others. Your original document will still be available to you with the selected text grayed out so you know which text needs to be protected.

Troubleshooting Tips

While using the tool you want to make sure that if you have a large amount of data pasted in the Office Clipboard, clear it before using this tool or else it may have an affect on the performance of this tool. As a best practice, you want to make sure that the Gray-25% text shading is not used in a redacted document, or else you may end up redacting text accidentally. If you don’t see the Redaction toolbar, simply click Toolbars on the View menu, and then click Redaction. To install this tool, make sure that Word is not open, especially as an e-mail editor. You may see the following error.

If you use Microsoft Word as your e-mail editor, Word will stay in memory even after you close the actual program. Try closing Word, make sure that Outlook is also closed (if you are using Word as your e-mail editor) and if all else fails, go to the Task Manager and kill the WINWORD.EXE process.

Downloading Redaction Tool

This add-on for Word 2003 works on Windows 2000 SP3, Windows XP SP1, and Windows Server 2003. By the way, Microsoft doesn’t support this tool because it’s not part of Microsoft Office, so use it at your own risk. The tool is built on Microsoft .NET Framework so you might want to make sure that your computer has the latest security updates for the .NET Framework. Click here to download the tool.