It will allow users to view the document, but not make any changes.Ĭlick on the Review tab and click on Protect Document or Restrict Editing depending on your version of Office.Ĭheck the Limit formatting to a selection of styles box and click on the Settings button. Protecting the document will prevent anyone from making any changes to any text. You can, however, prevent anyone from editing the text. If you send a document to someone that has hidden text, they will be able to view it if they know any of the procedures shown above. Unfortunately, there is no way to completely hide hidden text in Word.
#What is show hide in word how to#
So now that we know how to hide and show text, maybe you also want to prevent others from editing the hidden text? Well that is also possible as I show below. This setting is global, so you’ll have to go back and uncheck it later on if you don’t want to print hidden text for a different document. You can also get to this dialog by clicking on File, then Options and then clicking on the Display tab. Here you will see a Print hidden text box under Printing Options. This will bring up the Word Options dialog box with the Display tab already selected. In the Page Setup dialog, click on the Paper tab and then click on Print Options. When you go to File and then Print, click on Page Setup at the bottom. Printing hidden text in Word requires heading into the options section of the Print dialog. Now that you know how to hide and show hidden text, let’s talk about how to print it.
You can then start a new paragraph in the location you want and then click the button to hide the text again. If you want the text to remain in a certain place, you can click on the Show/Hide Paragraph Marks button and it will show you the hidden text with a special dotted underline. So instead of being overwritten, it simply gets pushed down. It’s now located under the paragraph that I had typed when the text was hidden. The hidden text is now visible, but as you can see, it’s in a slightly different location. Clicking on it once will change it into a checkmark, which means all the text in the document will be hidden and clicking on it again will remove the checkmark, meaning no text in the document should be hidden. This means that some of the text selected is hidden and some is visible. This time you will see the Hidden checkbox does not have a checkmark in it, but is instead fully green.
Press CTRL + A to highlight everything in the document, right-click on any highlighted portion and choose Font again. Ok, so how do we go about getting the hidden text back to show up again the document? We basically follow the same procedure that when we hid the text. So what happened? Well, I’ll explain that in the next section when I talk about viewing hidden text in Word. The first question that popped into my mind was what happens if I start typing in the blank area that held the text earlier? Well, I went ahead and tested it out by typing another paragraph where the hidden text was previously. The paragraph still exists and there are some interesting questions that arise now that it’s hidden. Go ahead and check that box.Ĭlick OK and POOF, your text is now gone! All I am left with is one paragraph with no sign of the other paragraph. In the Font dialog box, you’ll see the Hidden checkbox in the Effects section.