Black helicopter alert You know how it is - you're out in Nevada developing a hypersonic stealth vehicle based on alien technology and you've written the whole thing down in a Word document and you're about to release the astounding news to a gobsmacked world when you realise that the document contains sensitive information about how Microsoft has been abducting and anally probing Utah farmhands for years in an attempt to discover whether a penchant for open source software is genetically inherited and whether it can be combated by a combination of low-frequency mind control and packing lots of new and exciting features into the MS Office suite.

Don't panic - help is at hand in the form of the Office 2003 Word Redaction Add-in:

Redaction* is the careful editing of a document to remove confidential information.

The Microsoft Office Word 2003 Redaction Add-in makes it easy for you to mark sections of a document for redaction. You can then redact the document so that the sections you specified are blacked out. You can either print the redacted document or use it electronically.

Sensitive government documents, confidential legal documents, insurance contracts, and other sensitive documents are often redacted before being made available to the public. With the Word 2003 Redaction Add-in, users of Microsoft Office Word 2003 now have an effective, user-friendly tool to help them redact confidential text in Word documents.

We're not quite sure what the difference is between "redaction" and "deleting" here, but presumably if we could work it out an MS black ops team would storm the building and erase our memories with an MIB-style device. Still, it's better to be safe than sorry, even if Microsoft does add the following caveat:

We recommend that you carefully review any documents redacted using this tool to confirm that all the information that you intended to redact was successfully redacted**.

Yes, then eat the original, set fire to the building and kill yourself using the "Redmond Blue Pill" as supplied with your end user licence. Thank you. ®

Bootnote

*In our dictionary, "redaction" is simply preparing for publication, or editing. Mind you, it is an 1873 edition - printed long before Microsoft redefined the English language paradigm with its magnificent Encarta offering.

Bootnote II

**US Military take note.

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