As a business owner or professional, you likely work with sensitive or important documents on a regular basis. Whether it’s a contract, proposal, or report, it’s essential that these documents remain secure and unedited by unauthorized parties. Fortunately, Microsoft Word offers a range of tools to help you protect your documents and ensure that they remain confidential. In this article, we’ll go over the various methods you can use to password protect and restrict editing in Microsoft Word, so you can keep your documents safe and secure.
There are several ways to protect a document in Word. You can set a password for opening the document and prevent its editing, and also restrict or allow editing of any segment.
The document can be marked as read-only, but still allow changes to be made to certain parts of it. These parts with removed restrictions can be made available to any user who opens the document, or you can grant permission to edit these parts to specific users.
To protect the document and mark parts where changes are allowed:
- On the “Review” tab, in the “Protect” group, select the “Restrict Editing” command.
- In the “Editing Restrictions” area, check the “Allow only this type of editing in the document” box.
- In the list of editing restrictions, select “No Changes (Read Only)” and then click “Yes, Start Enforcing Protection.”
- To allow changes to specific parts, highlight the necessary fragment and go to the “Review” tab. In the “Protection” group, click on “Restrict Editing.” In the window that appears, remove the restrictions and click “Yes, Start Enforcing Protection.”
To remove protection from the document or a specific fragment, go to the “Review” tab and click on “Stop Protection.” If a password was set for the document, you will need to enter it.