Auto-Redact
Use automatic redaction to define words and patterns that are automatically marked for redaction.
Automatic redaction makes it easier to redact Office documents that have multiple portions of text that need to be hidden due to sensitivity or privacy issues.
To access this command...
Choose Tools - Auto-Redact
This feature comes in handy in documents that have multiple occurrences of names and other personal information (e.g. credit cards, phone numbers, etc). Redacting all these portions of the document manually would required significant effort, but with Automatic Redaction this task can be automated in a more efficient manner.
Creating Targets
Targets are rules and patterns used by Automatic Redaction to find portions of the document to be automatically marked for redaction.
To create a new target, click the Add Target button.
The Add Target dialogue box appears, to let you define a Name for the new target, as well as to choose its Type and Content. There are three types of targets to choose from in the Type drop-down list:
- Text: Automatic Redaction will look for all occurrences of the specified text and mark them for redaction.
- Regular expression: Define a regular expression to use to search the document. All matches will be marked for redaction.
- Predefined: Choose predefined regular expressions to automatically redact contents, such as credit card numbers, email addresses and so on.
Add all targets that you want to apply to your document and click OK. This opens the document as a drawing in Office Draw with all targets automatically redacted with the Rectangle Redaction tool.
Continue redacting other portions of the generated document and then print or export it to PDF.
Refer to the help page List of Regular Expressions to learn more about how to use regular expressions in Office.
Exporting and Importing Targets
Click the Save Targets button to save all defined targets in the document as a JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) file.
Click the Load Targets button to import and apply the targets defined in a JSON file to another Office document.
The document automatic redaction targets are saved alongside the document. Hence, they are available in the document after you save and close it.