When you send a screenshot of, say your email inbox, to somebody on the Internet but don't want to reveal your email id or some other information, what do you do? Blacken out your personal information using Paint or some other image editing tool. Now if you have to send a word document that contain some personal information that you don't want to share, what will you do then? You can use the Redaction plugin for Word 2003.

According to the Microsoft's site: “Redaction is the careful editing of a document to remove confidential information.

The Microsoft Office Word 2003 Redaction Add-in makes it easy for you to mark sections of a document for redaction. You can then redact the document so that the sections you specified are blacked out. You can either print the redacted document or use it electronically. In the redacted version of the document, the redacted text is replaced with a black bar and cannot be converted back to text or retrieved.

Sensitive government documents, confidential legal documents, insurance contracts, and other sensitive documents are often redacted before being made available to the public. With the Word 2003 Redaction Add-in, users of Microsoft Office Word 2003 now have an effective, user-friendly tool to help them redact confidential text in Word documents.

Highlight the text you want to redact as shown in the screenshot and then click Redact Document. This creates another Word document. You also have the option of protecting the document as well.



Select the text




Sensitive information replaced by black bars


Download Word Redaction for Office 2003