Microsoft Word 2007 Redaction Tool and Source released on CodePlex

CodePlex - Word 2007 Redaction Tool

“The Word 2007 Redaction Tool can be used to hide text within Microsoft Office Word documents. You can mark text to redact and then create a new, redacted version of the document in which the marked text is replaced with a black bar that cannot be converted back to the original text.

Overview

The Word 2007 Redaction tool works by allowing users to redact a document using a two stage process:

• First, regions of text which should be redacted are marked within the document.
• Second, the marked document is redacted, and all marked text is replaced.

Details

The add-in adds a Redact group to Word 2007's Review tab:

• Mark marks the selected content for redaction
• Unmark removes all redaction marks from the selected range
• Next moves the selection to the next redaction mark in the document (useful to see what content is marked)
• Previous moves the selection to the previous redaction mark in the document

…

Important Notes

This add-in is not officially supported by Microsoft; however, the source code is available so it can be viewed and modified (please consult the License tab if you have any questions on licensing).

We recommend that you carefully review any documents redacted using this tool to confirm that all the information that you intended to redact was successfully redacted.

…”

The Unmark concerns me a little and I will have to see how this add-in works in the real world. I would hate to be able to unmark a redaction after saving the document (as that would defeat the whole purpose of redacting the document). But since we have the source (yeah!) we can review the code and really see what it’s doing, etc. :)

[A few minutes later, after reading the User’s Guide in the current Release]

Okay, I understand it better and it makes sense. Once you burn in the redactions via the “Redact” command, a new copy of the document is created with the redactions in place, and underlying text gone-gone. Note that the whitespace is maintained so there is a slight chance that with statistical analysis some of the redacted words could possibly be determined. So as always, carefully review what you are redacting and the final results!

In any case, after reading the User’s Guide and seeing that we have the source, I have a much warmer fuzzy feeling about this tool… It SURE beats doing it manually or outside of Word.

(via The Road to Know Where - Microsoft's CodePlex Releases Word 2007 Redaction Tool)

 

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Office 2003 Add-in: Word Redaction