

Picture steganography-one of the Russian spies’ primary tactics-dates back to about the early 1990s. Since antiquity, clandestine couriers have used hundreds of steganographic techniques, including invisible ink, shrunken text, and strategically placed tattoos. The act of concealing data in plain sight is known as steganography. In June 2010, federal agents arrested 10 of them, who admitted to being secret agents a few weeks later. Department of Justice tracked down the altered images, which helped build a case against the Russians. Click this to delete all hidden text in the document.But the scheme wasn’t as covert as the spies had assumed. If the Document Inspector finds any hidden text, it shows you a “Remove All” button. The option you’re looking for is right at the bottom, and it’s called “Hidden Text.” Make sure any other options are switched off (unless you want to use them at the same time) and click the “Inspect” button. You can use that method to choose which hidden text to remove, but if you just want to guarantee that any hidden text is deleted, go to File > Check For Issues > Inspect Document. Yes, and we’ve previously shown you a way of doing this using Find and Replace. The same goes for showing formatting marks, which you can do in the Word desktop app. We mentioned at the top of this article that you can only hide/unhide text in the Word client and not in Word Online. Select all the text in the document by hitting Ctrl+A and then use either of those same methods (Ctrl+Shift+H or Font > Hidden) to unhide all hidden text in the entire document (except in headers or footers, which you’ll have to do separately).Ĭlick Home > Show/Hide or hit Ctrl+Shift+8 again to hide the formatting marks. If you’ve got a lot of hidden text to unhide, or you don’t want to search the whole document for hidden text, no problem. Select it and hit Ctrl+Shift+H or untick the”Hidden” field in the Font panel. (Not sure what an “anchored object” is? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered with our guide to positioning objects in Word.) How Do You Unhide Text? This hides the anchored object at the same time. If your object has a different text wrapping option, but you still want to hide it, you’ll have to hide the paragraph to which the object is anchored.

This method only works if your object uses the default text wrapping option of “In line with text,” which is when Word treats an object as just another piece of text. You hide objects in the same way as you hide text-by selecting them and ticking the”Hidden” field in the Font panel (or using Ctrl+Shift+H). If all that mouse clicking is too much for you, there’s also a keyboard shortcut to hide text-select your text and hit Ctrl+Shift+H. The text you selected is no longer visible as if you’d deleted it from the document. Turn on the “Hidden” option and then click the “OK” button. Select the text you want to hide, switch to the “Home” tab on the Ribbon, and then click the arrow at the bottom right of the “Font” group.
MAKE YOUR OWN RED REVEAL HIDDEN MESSAGES FOR ANDROID
Word Online and Word apps for Android and iPhone don’t (yet) allow you to hide text. Note: You can only do this in the Word client on your computer. You can also hide images and other embedded objects, which can cut down on print time and cost, as well as make your document more readable if you just want pure text.

You might also want different people to review different parts of a document, and hidden text presents a simple way to show only those parts that you need a person to review (as long as you don’t mind them seeing the hidden text if they find it). One great use for this is if you had a document you want to print and hand out to an audience, but you wanted your copy of the document to contain notes just for you. If you want to print a document without some text showing up, you can do that with hidden text (although make sure you haven’t turned on the option to print hidden text). If you don’t want someone to read something you’ve written, either remove the text entirely or don’t send the document to them. So it’s not a security measure, and you should never rely on hidden text to prevent a determined person from reading something in your document. Instead of removing the text, Word applies a formatting mark that means “don’t display this text.”īecause hidden text is just standard text with formatting marks applied, anyone who can edit the document can search for hidden text and display it. Word hides text by using formatting marks-the same way you’d format text as bold or italic.
