Google Docs give us a wonderful opportunity to share your files with colleagues and collaborators. You can share Google Docs and give them different levels of access to your GDocument: they can either edit or only view it.
But did you know that you could also hide some specific parts of the text from them?
So here are the detailed instructions on how you can do this.
First click the “Add-ons -> Get Add-ons” in the top menu:
Type “Docsecrets” in the search field. Install this free application by clicking on the blue button “+Free”.
This app is especially designed for making some parts of the text in your documents unavailable for people you share the doc with.
You can see now this app in your Google Documents. To use it go once again to “Add-ons -> Get Add-ons” and choose the Docsecrets from the drop-down menu. The app will be displayed on the right-hand side in your document.
To start working with it you will need to set up the passphrase you will lock and unlock your text with.
Now you can finally do this. Highlight the text you want to hide and click the “Censor text button” button. The text will be hidden behind the colored bars. You as an owner of the document will still be able to see what’s under those bars. But nobody else will.
If you want to share Google Docs text back reveal it with one click of a mouse.
Please note that hiding the text from the outsiders will not help you with your data safety if you still give them any access to your GDocs. These people will still be able to edit other parts of the document and accidentally erase some of them.
The best way to protect your cloud data from deletion is to make regular backups with additional applications like Upsafe free Google Apps backup. Set up this app for free and never again lose the documents that are important to you.