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Automatic Redaction

Overview

Excel Redact has the ability to automatically create redactions on excel documents. Given a list of search term rules, a worker agent will search the excel worksheet's cell data as well as any objects containing text (e.g. comments, text boxes, named ranges, macros, worksheet names). For any matches, depending on the type of redaction provided in the search term rule, a redaction will be created and added to the database.

This can be a great way to decrease the amount of time when reviewing or redacting and provides a powerful set of tools to build redaction templates across excels, or simply to find keywords within an excel to be redacted.


Setup

  1. Navigate to the workspace you want to bulk create redacted excels.

  2. Go to the Bulk Process sub-tab under the Excel Redact workspace tab.

  3. Click New at the top of the page to open the Bulk Process edit page.

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  1. Fill out the fields on the layout.

  2. Name.

  3. Searchable set - The saved search containing the excels you want to bulk process.
  4. Processing settings - Select a Processing Settings configuration. See the Create Processing Settings section. Only used when creating the redacted native.

  5. Automatic Redaction Keywords - Enter the search term rules here. Refer to the Syntax section below. Each rule must be on a newline.

  6. Click Save. A console window will appear on the right-hand side.

  7. Click Automatically Redact Keywords.

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    This will add a job to the manager agent, which will batch the documents in the saved search into groups of 50. A worker job for each batch will be added to the worker queue.

    Each worker agent will pick up one batch at a time and create the redacted copies of the excel documents.

    To view the status of the set, under the Status category there are two fields.

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    The Status field will show the current status of the set. Queued, InProgress, Complete, Complete with errors, or Failed.

    The Status History field will display messages outputted by the manager and worker agents, along with any errors if encountered. It will display what batch is currently processing and how many batches were created in total.


Syntax

Redaction Type

Example

Black:keyword or phrase
White:keyword or phrase
Text:REDACTEDTEXT:keyword or phrase
Replace:REDACTEDTEXT:keyword or phrase

Colours

Example

Text:BG:colour:FG:colour:REDACTEDTEXT:keyword or phrase
Replace:BG:colour:FG:colour:REDACTEDTEXT:keyword or phrase

Row and Column

Example

<REDACTION PHRASE> refers to any other type of redaction rule. e.g Black:, White:, Text:, Replace:
ROW:<REDACTION PHRASE>:keyword or phrase
NOTROW:<REDACTION PHRASE>:keyword or phrase
COLUMN:<REDACTION PHRASE>:keyword or phrase
UNREDACT:ROW:<REDACTION PHRASE>
UNREDACT:COLUMN:<REDACTION PHRASE>

Specific Row and Column

Example

REDACT:ROW:X:COLUMN:Y
UNREDACT:ROW:X:COLUMN:Y
REDACT:ROWSPECIFIC:X
UNREDACT:ROWSPECIFIC:X
REDACT:COLUMNSPECIFIC:X
UNREDACT:ROWSPECIFIC:X