Word 2007 Redaction Tool Helps You Blank Private Text

Windows only: Microsoft’s Word 2007 has lots of fancy editing options, but one it curiously lacks is a redaction tool — something that lets you permanently black out private details such as phone numbers or names before making a document public. The open source Word 2007 Redaction Tool tries to fill that gap, adding a Redact group onto the ribbon’s Review tab. While you could just try deleting or over-writing the relevant text, that’s often easy to undo with revision tools. This is definitely still in beta mode — it took me more than an hour to run the installer (I suspect the bloated, lethargic .NET was largely to blame there) and even then it refused to actually start-up within Word’s add-ons architecture. If you have more luck, share your experiences in the comments. Word 2007 Redaction is a free download for Windows only, requires the .NET Framework 3.5 release.

[via Microsoft Office Word Team's Blog]