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How to find hidden text in a Word document

Updated 9 October 2026

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Text can be in a Word document without anyone being able to see it. Sometimes it's left over from an old draft, sometimes a template put it there, and occasionally it's put there on purpose. Here's how to find each kind.

1. Text formatted as "hidden"

  1. On the Home tab, click the (Show/Hide) button. Hidden text appears with a dotted underline.
  2. To make it always visible: on Windows, File > Options > Display and tick Hidden text. On a Mac, Word > Settings > View and tick Hidden text.
  3. Delete what shouldn't be there, or select it and untick Hidden in the Font settings (Ctrl+D on Windows, Cmd+D on a Mac).

2. White text on a white background

The Document Inspector doesn't detect this. To reveal it, temporarily change the page colour: Design > Page Color and pick a mid grey. White text will now stand out. Set the page colour back to No Color when you're done.

3. Tiny text

Text set to 1pt looks like a thin line or a stray full stop. Press Ctrl+A (Cmd+A on a Mac) to select everything and look at the font size box: if it goes blank, there's more than one size in the document. Scan for anything suspiciously small, especially at the ends of paragraphs.

4. Invisible characters

Zero-width spaces and similar characters take up no space at all, and some tools use them to tag or fingerprint text. Word's Find can search for them by code: in Find and Replace, search for ^u8203 (zero-width space), ^u8204, ^u8205 or ^u65279. There are many such characters, so this catches the common ones rather than all of them.

5. Text in other places

Also check headers and footers, footnotes, text boxes, and anything sitting behind an image or shape.

Or skip the checklist

Clean Retype reads your document the way a person would and types the visible words into a brand-new Word file. Metadata, comments, tracked changes, hidden text and invisible characters can't come along, because the original file is never copied.

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Headings, bold, italic, lists, tables and pictures come through. Exact fonts don't.

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