How to Redact PDFs in Adobe Acrobat

foreign [Music] hi this is iron iyerson one of the trainers with the computer Workshop in today's tutorial I'm going to go over how you can do redactions inside of Adobe Acrobat Pro here you can see an example of a document that I wish to redact this document contains Social Security numbers phone numbers as well as text that needs to be redacted to begin we need to engage the redaction tool set to do this we could a come to the upper left corner of the interface and tap the tools tab or B while you are looking at the right panel where all of your tool sets are you will see a little wrench this is your more tools button tapping that will again open the same tool window looking through the list of tools that you have available you will notice that they are organized into categories here at the top you will notice the create and edit set followed by the forms and signature set share and review protect and standardized as well as custom in our case we are going to look for the protect and standardized set of tools and locate the redact tool set currently it is not part of our tool sets so we will click the add button which will now put a shortcut to this tool set here in your tool set panel clicking that tool set will take me back into my document and open my redaction tools at the top you will notice you have two buttons one will be for redaction and the other will allow you to sanitize the document this will remove hidden and sensitive information we're going to focus on redaction to begin I'm going to click on the drop down for the redact text and images here you will find the ability to redact entire pages you will also be able to open up a search panel using the find text and redact option as well as the properties this is where we'll Begin by taking a look at the properties when the redaction property window opens you will notice that there are two tabs the appearance and general we are going to focus our attention on the appearance this panel or this tab I should say is divided into two halves the top half is about how this will appear when the redaction is applied the lower half will be how the redactions will be appearing while you are marking things to be redacted in the top half you can set the redaction area fill color this can be black or any color that you so desire as well as the ability to add overlay text notice that all of your text formatting controls are currently grayed out until this checkbox is engaged now you can set your font you can type in your default text that you would like to use in this case I am going to Simply uncheck the overlay text and stick with using a simple black fill for the appearance of the text to be redacted you can see you have an outline as well as a fill color and you can adjust the opacity of the fill color it's a good idea to leave this somewhere in the middle around 50 percent using light colors for the fill and maybe a bright vivid color that shows up in the rest of the document very easily if I have a document that has a lot of red within it I might choose a different color as the outline looking at the general tab you will see the author and subject information simply tap the OK leaving things as is to Simply Mark areas of text to redact or images you would draw a highlight over that text and as soon as you let go the text will be marked for redaction you can see in this case it has a red outline or border with a semi-transparent yellow fill and you can simply continue to Mark and Mark and Mark you can Mark whole words you can Mark partial words and this is a great method when you have bulk large areas that you wish to Simply redact for more complex specialized searching of this document we're going to go back up to that redact text and images drop down button and choose the find text and redact the search pane opens and you will notice here that you are able to search the current document or you can search for all PDF documents in any given folder this is a very interesting idea if you were to consider you have a bulk amount of documents that require redaction creating a folder on your system where you can put copies of all of those files and then simply run all the search and redaction from here is a really really nice option in our case we're going to leave this at the single or current document you can search for single words and phrases and simply enter those words and phrases as you need you can Define this to be whole words only and you can also include case sensitivity you could search for multiple words and phrases and you can also search for patterns in this case looking at patterns you can choose to search for phone numbers credit cards Social Security numbers email addresses or dates I'm going to begin by simply searching for phone numbers and I'm going to tap that button right there that says search and remove text now this does not necessarily remove it but it will allow you to market for reduction any instances of a phone number that are in this document will be listed here and I can simply check all by using the check all button or go through and check them individually I find it a lot quicker to use this since it is a quick and simple redaction that I'm looking for any phone number at all I want removed down below here again you can continue to Mark partial words or whole words for redaction in this case I want to Mark the entire thing and simply click the mark redacted results for redaction button notice in my document any phone numbers have now also been marked for redaction now to remove the social security numbers I will go back up in my search panel and tap the new search and change my pattern to the appropriate option and any numbers that mirror a social security pattern are going to be located and then I can simply use the check all and Mark checked results for redaction clicking new search I can now go ahead and say I want to search for any specific names in this case I would use the single word or phrase and type into the field what I'm looking for so in this case I'm going to look for Brian Doe I am going to make it case sensitive and I'm simply going to click search and remove text it finds this many instances of that name that I am going to remove and tap new search the multiple word or phrases is a very robust tool that allows you to search for many many things all at the same time when we click select words we can add a whole list of words that we are looking for so I could search for the name of an application in this case word and tap the add button I could also search for the word design I could search for the word video down below I have the options to engage for case sensitivity and whole words only going to leave both of these checked and tap ok what is different this time using the multiple word or phrase option is that when I tap OK on that list of words it automatically just marks all of those things for redaction I'm going to close my search window to apply the redaction I simply come to the top right corner of my redaction toolbar and tap the apply button you will be prompted to apply the redactions you will be also asked whether you would like to sanitize the document which removes all the hidden information and metadata associated with the file in this case I'm just going to leave that alone and tap continue the save as window will open immediately showing you the original file name underscore redacted as the proposed new file name simply tap the save button when you are ready any text that was marked for reduction is now redacted once the text has been redacted there is no way to undo these actions that is why you are prompted right away to save as this way you are assured that your original document is in its original condition and the new copy of the document is the one that is redacted I hope that you found this tutorial helpful if you did please go ahead and subscribe to our Channel and like this video we do try to put out new content on a regular basis if there are things that you would like to see please leave a suggestion in the comments below don't forget to check us out on LinkedIn Instagram Facebook and you can always find much more information on classes that we offer on our website TC workshop.com thanks again for watching and take care for now

Channel: The Computer Workshop

Views: 19,593

Keywords:

Id: lSB5iXpEyPY

Length: 11min 26sec (686 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 24 2023