Finding hidden prompts in a document

What this helps against

A document can contain text you do not see when reading it: white on white, in font size 1, in a footnote, behind a graphic. That text is not meant for you but for an AI tool processing the document – with instructions to flatter an assessment, say, or to skip a passage.

Task menu ▸ Analyze ▸ Find Hidden Prompts

Worth doing for anything that comes from outside and is to be processed further: applications, offers, submitted documents.

What gets checked

If you have text selected, only that is checked. With nothing selected the add-in asks: "You have not selected any text. Check the all text (including foot- and endnotes) or instead check a file?"

• Check all text – the open document including foot- and endnotes.
• Check file – a file you select, without opening it first.

The OCR question

For files the add-in asks whether OCR should be run on scanned PDFs – and says straight away what that means: it takes longer, and invisible text may not be found.

That is the decisive limitation of this feature: OCR reads what is visible in the image. Precisely what was hidden is not visible there.

The result

Passages found are marked as comments in the document. If something sits in a foot- or endnote you also get a final notice, because comments cannot be placed everywhere there.

If nothing is found it says: "No potentially malicious text found."

What that message does not mean

It does not mean the document is clean. It means this check found nothing. New obfuscation techniques, text inside images, content in embedded objects – all of that can slip through.

So treat a document from an unknown source with the same caution as before. The check lowers the risk; it does not remove it.

Cancelling

The check runs with a progress display and can be cancelled. Comments placed up to that point remain.