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Redact

Redact takes a document, lets you mark what should be hidden, burns those redactions in permanently, and saves the redacted copy as a PDF in a Drive folder. Only the redacted copy is kept: the original and every working copy are deleted the moment it's saved.

What it's for​

Sharing a document that contains personal or confidential information: a contract with account numbers, a medical record, a form with a Social Security number, an email thread with phone numbers and addresses. You mark the parts to hide, by hand or with AI suggestions, and Redact produces a file in which that text is gone, not just covered.

From the dashboard sidebar, open Redact. It appears only for members who have the Redact permission (see Access).

Key concepts​

  • Job — each document you upload is a job. A job holds the original and the boxes you've marked until you save or discard it.
  • Box — a marked area on a page. Everything inside a box is removed when you burn. A box can carry a label.
  • Burn — makes the redactions permanent. The output is always a PDF named <name>_redacted.pdf. Every page is flattened to an image, so nothing under a box survives, and a searchable text layer is rebuilt from what's left. Redacted text is removed from the file, not hidden behind a black rectangle.
  • Nothing lingers — when the redacted file is saved, the original and all working copies are deleted. A job that isn't finished within 24 hours is deleted automatically. Discard deletes a job immediately.

Supported files​

KindFormats
PDF.pdf
ImagesPNG, JPG, TIFF, BMP, GIF, WebP
Office documentsWord, Excel, PowerPoint, and OpenDocument files
Other documentsRTF, HTML, plain text, Markdown
Email.eml, .msg

Files can be up to 100 MB. Audio and video files aren't supported; to remove personal info from call recordings, see Call Redaction.

How to redact a document​

  1. Open Redact and upload a document.
  2. Mark what to hide in the editor (see Using the editor), or click Suggest redactions to have AI propose boxes.
  3. Review every box. Accept the suggestions you want to keep.
  4. Choose where to save the redacted copy (see Saving to Drive).
  5. Burn and save. The redacted PDF lands in the chosen folder, and the original is deleted.

Using the editor​

  • Select text on a page to mark it.
  • Draw an area to mark anything, including images, signatures, and handwriting. An area can span pages.
  • Move and resize any box by dragging it or its edges.
  • Find a word or phrase to mark every occurrence in the document at once.
  • Undo and redo any change. The usual keyboard shortcuts work for undo, redo, and removing the selected box.

Labels​

Each box can carry a label explaining what was removed. Pick one from the quick palette (SSN, Name, Phone, Email, Address, DOB, Account #) or type your own. With Show labels on the burned file turned on, each label is printed in white on its black box in the output, so readers can see what kind of information was removed.

Turn on Break all links to remove every hyperlink from the output, including links outside the redacted areas.

Suggest redactions​

Suggest redactions runs an AI pass over the document and proposes boxes for personal information: names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, postal addresses, account and ID numbers, and medical identifiers.

  • It runs only when you click it, and each click counts as one AI task.
  • Suggested boxes stay pending until you accept them. Only accepted suggestions and boxes you drew yourself are burned; pending suggestions are ignored.
  • Each suggestion shows why it was proposed, so you can judge it before accepting.

Suggestions are a starting point, not a guarantee. Review the whole document before you burn: anything you don't mark stays in the output.

Saving to Drive​

Pick any Drive and folder you can write to. The default folder is Redacted/, and Redact remembers your last choice for next time.

The saved file is an ordinary Drive file: it has versions, can be shared, and shows up in search like anything else in the Drive. Its access follows the folder you saved it to.

Access​

Using Redact requires:

  • the Redact permission, which a company admin can grant through a role, and
  • access to at least one Drive where you can save files.