Hide Text Forever

[Guest]

Hi Guys,

I have been trying to find a way to permanently hide some confidential text
in a Word document and hope someone out there can help.

I created a document that contains a reference section that are referred to
throughout the document. I want to distribute this document as a read-only
document but I do not want to disclose the reference section as it is
confidential.

I have set the password protection so that the document is read-only without
the password.

Here are what I have tried and FAILED to achieve my objective so far:

1. Hide Text : hightlight the reference section text and set it to hidden,
but others can simply toggle it to unhide it even though the document is
modification protected.

2. Master document: break the document into 2 subdocuments "content" and
"reference" and insert them into a master document, so I could distribute
just the "content" subdocument. But with only the "content" subdocument, all
the cross-reference in that subdocument becomes error.

3. Use white colour to hide it: but this is not fool proof.

Any suggestions?

Tks.

JY

 

[Tony Jollans]

Basically you can't do it.

What you might be able to do is to create your document with all the
references (which are all Fields). Make sure all the references ae correct
than delete the reference section and protect the document. The Fields will
not be automatically updated (assuming they're in the main body of the
document) and the protection will stop anybody manually updating them (from
non-existent source). I haven't tried this, of course, it's just an idea.

 

[Jay Freedman]

JY, Tony's idea may work. If it does, it's probably the only way that
will work. Give up any hope of having the reference section stay in
the document that you distribute, because all anyone needs to do to
see the "hidden" text is to open the document in a text editor such as
Notepad.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
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