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I have placed and styled (give height and width and some shadow) an image in a Word 2013 document. After that i've noticed there is some sensitive data on the picture, which can't be shown on the document.

Is there any way to blur out a specific part of the image without having to delete the image, edit it and place it back into the document?

Note: Cropping the image isn't an option.

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  • The answers all seem to have missed the point. Extracting the image from the DOCX renamed to ZIP and replacing it with an edited copy is more tedious than simply editing the image you have already and placing it back, just as you've stated. The rest all deal with overlays which can easily be removed by anyone. The answer to your question is no.
    – Karan
    Commented May 28, 2015 at 1:29

5 Answers 5

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I think the only way you can blur (meaning blur, not just hide or mask) is with a hack.

Download a font which is blurred (they exist, use your favorite search engine), and use the Text Box to draw a box over the area, type the same content over the top (masking the image below).

At worse case, you'll need to first add a shape over the area to mask it (using the same colour as the background , in your case black) and then add the blurred font.

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Easily, actually solid colour is safer. Open mspaint and paste the image into mspaint Click rectangle, choose fill:solid colour, draw the rectangle

copy/paste it back into word

enter image description here

And in Word you can do the same, place a rectangle with solid colour fill over the sensitive area

Update You can do real blurring as an artistic effect but that seems to be for the entire picture only. enter image description here

enter image description here

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  • True @Dave it isn't blurred and I think Word cannot do this.
    – Benjamin Hastings
    Commented May 27, 2015 at 7:51
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Seeing as docx is just a renamed zip folder you could do the following

  1. save the file as documentname.docx
  2. rename it to documentname.zip
  3. extract the files to a folder.
  4. Open the \word\media folder and find the image.
  5. Edit in any image editor without changing the size.
  6. zip everything back up and rename it to documentname.docx

Note: I don't currently have office installed so these were done with libre office and the docx it saves as. It should be the same either way.

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As an alternative, you could copy your image, crop it down to the section you want blurred. Then apply the blur effect and lay that over the top of our original image where you want it blurred. When finished, group the two images together or use the snip-it tool to create a new image.

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Old question but still relevant. So, I will answer in a hope that it will benefit people who stumble upon this.

  1. Install Greenshot from here
  2. While in Word, Press the "Print Screen" function key on your keyboard to bring up Greenshot as shown below:

enter image description here

  1. Select the image you want to obfuscate as shown, and open in image editor

enter image description here

  1. Select the obfuscation tool (marked 1), select the full area you want to obfuscate (marked 2) and click copy (marked 3)

enter image description here

  1. Paste in Word

enter image description here

This is the simplest and fastest obfuscation workflow I have found so far.

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