“Hide” Text In A Document

by on Dec 9, 2009 | 3 comments

If you ever want to “hide” text in a document so only people who know to look for it can find it, there are a few tricks you can use:

  • Color the text the same as the background (white on white).
  • Shrink the font.
  • Hide text in the header/footer.
  • Combine any of the above.

You can then ‘reveal’ the text by highlighting the respective area or by copy-pasting the entire text to notepad.  While you cannot absolutely hide the text in plain sight, these tricks for the most part will leave your text hidden. I cannot really think of a use for this, but somebody might have one.

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  • Mark

    A teacher could prepare assignments, quizzes, tests and worksheets using this method. When printed, the “hidden” text won’t print and the saved file can serve as the answer sheet.

  • Elaine

    Actually, a better place to hide text in a document is comment it out in the VBA editor if you are using Word. Most average users don’t have a clue how to get to the VBA editor. But even people who did know wouldn’t bother to look there for hidden text without a specific reason.

  • David Kennedy

    I’m not sure about in documents, but in a webpage, it’s a decent trick to get debug/error messages. I’ve written some pages that put a “friendly” error message visible to the user but put the actual error in an html comment, where I can find it.

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