We’ve had several support queries recently asking whether we provide a solution for removing annotations from a PDF Document. We do but it is perhaps not an obvious action which provides this capability! But firstly, why?
This blog post is a quick look into why people need to alter PDF annotations, and then an explanation of how Power Automate can help.
If you want to make sure that your PDF remains unaltered, then you might want to remove or hide annotations.
You have sent a document as an attachment in an email and later realize that there are some notes in it. You don’t want the recipient of the email to see those notes, so you need to remove them from the PDF file.
There are some documents that you may want to keep confidential. You can do this by removing annotations from the document. If a PDF file has been annotated and you need to send it as an attachment, then the general rule of thumb is that you should remove any annotations before attaching it.
Reference: Compress PDF
The ‘Compress PDF‘ action provides several configuration options covering image quality and resolution, object removal, field flattening, etc. and it also provides the following two options for annotations:
These configuration options will allow you to either ‘burn’ the annotations into the document (Flattening) or delete the annotations, perfect!
The following post provides a good example for creating a Flow to ‘Compress PDF‘ documents: Compress PDF Documents in Power Automate
Additionally please refer to the following short video tutorial. It outlines the changes applied to a PDF document when using the ‘Flatten Annotations‘ and ‘Delete Annotations‘ configuration options.
UPDATE: We’re excited to announce some significant updates to Flowr for Power Automate! As of October 2024, we’ve improved by updating action names and splitting Flowr’s central Power Automate connector into nine specialized connectors. These changes will make your workflow faster, smoother, and more efficient. The new action names are more precise and intuitive, saving you time, while the focused connectors enhance performance and flexibility. This update also helps future-proof the platform for even more powerful features. Check out our updated action names blog.
Managing Director
