The present invention provides a text-based data hiding method to insert external 5 information into Microsoft Word document. Unicode space characters are used together with the ordinary space character to encode external information using interword. inter-sentence, end-of-line and paragraph spacings in Microsoft Word document. This text-based data hiding method is reversible where the embedded information can be removed to completely reconstruct the original Microsoft Word 10 document. Experiments were carried out to verify the performance of the present invention as well as comparing it to the existing space-manipulating data hiding methods. Results suggest that the present invention offers higher embedding efficiency while exhibiting higher imperceptivity of white space manipulation when compared to the existing methods. In the best case scenario, the present invention 15 produces output document of size almost 9 times smaller than that of the existing method.