Lawyers often have to redact documents in order to obscure confidential, privileged or sensitive information. Redaction is most typically required for documents filed with a court or exchanged during discovery.
For PDF documents, redaction is a fairly simple process, because most of the leading PDF programs used by lawyers include redaction as a built-in feature. Both Adobe Acrobat Pro and Nuance Power PDF Advanced include the ability to black out sensitive information.
Redaction is not so straightforward in Microsoft Word and Excel. To redact text in these programs, you need a third-party plug-in. For Word 2007 and 2010, a free redaction tool can be downloaded from redaction.codeplex.com. The tool was created by a Microsoft engineer, but it is not officially supported by Microsoft. Its functionality in Word is limited and it does not work with Excel.
