How to Use Search and Redact in Adobe Acrobat

You can use search and redact in an Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional PDF to quickly locate text that you want to delete from the PDF document. This option can be used on any searchable PDF and only takes a few minutes to complete. Follow the steps below to find out how you can use search and redact in your Acrobat documents.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional

1. Start Adobe Acrobat Professional 8 and open the PDF that contains the text that you want to remove from the PDF.

2. Choose the “View” menu, point to “Toolbars” and select “Redaction” to bring up the Redaction toolbar. Select the “Search and Redact” button from the Redaction toolbar to open the “Search” window. Click the “OK” button if you receive a warning from Adobe Acrobat referring to images contained within the PDF.

3. Type a word or phrase you would like to search for and remove in the “What word or phrase would you like to search for?” text box.

4. Select whether to search in the current PDF document or in all PDF documents by selecting the appropriate radio button under the “Where would you like to search?” section. If you would like to search in all PDF documents, you will need to choose the location of those PDF documents using the drop-down list.

5. Add a checkmark to the checkboxes if you would like to search “Whole words only” or “Case-sensitive.” Click the “Search and Redact” button to begin the search. The results will be displayed in the “Search” window.

6. Check the items that you would like to redact from the PDF document. You can use the “Check All” button to check all of the instances.

7. Click the “Mark Checked Results for Redaction” from the “Search” window and then the “Apply Redactions” button from the Redaction toolbar to remove the instances of text within the PDF document.