Adobe Acrobat: Redact Your PDFs the Right Way!

About this video

The video warns that highlighting text black in Word and exporting to PDF does not redact it: selecting all, copying, and pasting into a text document reveals the supposedly hidden text. The proper method is Adobe Acrobat’s professional redaction tools. Open the PDF, open the Redact PDF tool, and set properties first: the default redaction color is black, but any color or white can be chosen, and overlay text such as ‘redacted’ can be added. Mark text and images for redaction by selecting them, or use Find text and redact to locate every instance of a word or phrase, such as ‘benefits’ in the example, check the results to keep, and mark them. Content is not removed until you click Apply, which warns that removal is permanent. Acrobat also offers to sanitize and remove hidden information such as metadata and document author. It prompts you to save immediately, adding ‘redacted’ to the file name so the redacted file is a separate copy. Copying from the finished PDF then yields only the non-redacted content. A caveat is noted: Acrobat cannot find text that exists only as an image in the document.

Key takeaways

• Black highlighting in Word does not redact: copied PDF text can be pasted elsewhere and read in full
• Use Acrobat’s Redact PDF tool and set properties for color and optional overlay text before marking content
• Use Find text and redact to mark every instance of a word or phrase rather than hunting individually
• Redaction is permanent only after clicking Apply, and sanitizing can also remove hidden metadata
• Acrobat saves the result as a separate copy with ‘redacted’ added to the file name; text inside images will not be found

Episode details: published January 7, 2026 · 4:12 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Kevin Stratvert’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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