Microsoft has released the Microsoft Office Word 2003 Redaction Add-in. Redaction is simply blacking out (not to be confused with legal blacklining) sensitive or confidential blocks of text in a document so it can be released. Unlike deleting the text, redacting retains the pagination and formatting of the original document.
Here’s how Microsoft describes it:
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.
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.
It allows you to show/hide the redacted portions in the original document so it can remain a live document. The document with the blacked out text is “published” as a new document. It’s great for created printed documents or PDF documents.
However, it does not remove metadata from the document. While the text is irrevocably “removed,” document statistics and other properties are carried over to the redacted document. If you want to distribute the redacted document in Word format, make sure you run it through your metadata removal tool!