If you selected Replace All, a series of small dialog boxes will tell you how many replacements were made. Replace, Replace All, and Find Next buttons Find Next finds the next occurrence without making a replacement.įigure 6.Select the Replace, Replace All, or Find Next button. (The trademark appears in this example.) Figure 5. Enter the replacement character in the Replace with text box. Copyright symbol in the Find What text boxĥ. (Some special characters aren’t visible in the text box, so do a test run before selecting the Replace All button in step 6.) Figure 4. Ensure that the special character appears in the Find what text box in the Find and Replace dialog box. (The copyright symbol appears in this example.) Figure 1. Select the special character in your text. To insert special characters directly into the Find and Replace dialog box:ġ. Twelve special characters can be inserted directly into the Find and Replace dialog box by selecting the character: The bad news is that, as with Hidden Text, shows Strikethrough when you're sending plain text, but doesn't actually send it.Enter Special Characters Directly into the Find and Replace Dialog Box If you send it as plain text, it doesn't. The good news is that if you send Strikethrough as rich text, it arrives as Strikethrough. Some people may be curious about other text effects, such as Strikethrough. This is a particularly good idea if you're sending a Word document to the sort of person who might look for hidden comments and other information, eg me. So, I'm adding a new item to my production routine: Inspect Document before sending it. Inspect Document looks for comments and revisions, personal metadata (author, time taken etc), watermarks and … Hidden Text. This lets you encrypt or protect a document, among other things. Further down the list is another item: Prepare. Inspect Document will find hidden text and other information you may not know is there.Ĭlicking the Orb (aka Office Button) in Microsoft Word 2007 or later brings up a familiar menu for opening, saving or printing documents. In my view, both Gmail and should show Hidden Text in both rich-text and plain-text emails, and if they don't do that, they should strip it out.įortunately, there is a simple solution, and it's also one that's important for removing other possibly-sensitive data. That's bad.Īnything that's hidden from the sender should also be hidden from the recipient.
That is logical but not very helpful, because both and Gmail show Hidden Text to the person who receives the email, whether it was marked as Hidden Text or not. Gmail shows Hidden Text if you paste it into a plain text email, and does not show Hidden Text if you paste it into a rich text email. should show Hidden Text when you paste it into a plain text email, so that you can see exactly what you are sending. Unfortunately, it also hides Hidden Text if you paste into a Plain text email, even though it's clearly visible when you look at the same email in the Sent folder. hides Hidden Text if you copy-and-paste from Word into a Rich text email. The second point is that and Gmail behave differently, and I think 's behaviour is illogical at best. Either way, the first point is: watch out for Hidden Text. I'd never actually used Hidden Text, but that hadn't stopped hidden texts from appearing in my document. The central part of the sheet offers check-boxes for a number of effects such as Strikethrough and Subscript. To hide something, you highlight it, go to the Home tab, and select Font to get the properties sheet. This is a little-used feature of Microsoft Word. So where had they come from? Setting Hidden Text in WordĪfter some head scratching, I figured out that the spurious lines had been marked as hidden text in the original document. They weren't visible in the original email, sent from my address. These extra lines weren't visible in my original Word.rtf (Rich Text File) document. However, when I went to Gmail to confirm it, I was disconcerted to see several spurious bits of text in the opening. Someone claimed that one of my articles hadn't arrived, but I knew this was wrong, because I always send a bcc: (blind copy) to one of my own email addresses.
I learned this the hard way, even though I never use Word's hidden text feature. If you must hide text in Microsoft Word, watch out: both Gmail and will show Hidden Text in plain view, and with, you won't even know until it's too late.