We're not suggesting this as a way of protecting sensitive data, but it can have its uses. You can, for example, hide chunks of 'boilerplate' text - such as legal notices - in a document to make it less cluttered. 'Hidden' is something of a misnomer, it should be 'hideable' as you can go to Tools, Options, View and choose to show it or not from the Formatting Marks section. It will also appear if you show all formatting marks from the toolbar. When hidden text is made visible, it is shown with a black dotted underline.

Name: Did you know you can hide text in Word.jpg Views: 819 Size: 23.0 KB

One nice feature is that printing has independent options to print hidden text or not. This makes it possible to print a 'light' version of a long document, and you'll find the option by clicking the Options button in the File,
Print dialogue.

Hidden is a font attribute, and you'll find it in the Effects section of the Font dialogue (see screen 5). As with most formatting, however, it's more manageable when included in a style. So, for example, you could create a new style, based on the Normal style, called HiddenNormal, then click the Format button, choose Font and set the hidden effect. Repeat for other commonly used styles until you have a regular and hidden version of each.