How to Protect Your Microsoft Word Documents

In Microsoft Office, there is an easy way to protect your document. When I say protect, I mean make it so that it cannot be formatted or edited by anyone unless they have a password. This can be useful if many people use your computer or account and you would like to keep from being modified. Or maybe you just feel like having it be read-only.

After you have saved your Word document to wherever you want to save it, go to Tools -> Protect Document... . This will bring up a small pane on the right with 3 options: Formatting restrictions, Editing restrictions, Start enforcement.

In Formatting restrictions, you can check mark the "Limit formatting to a selection of styles" and then click the "Settings" link to bring up all the options that are available in terms of what kind of formatting is allowed and what kind is not allowed, Word even gives you recommendations to how you should set these options. It has an option to put restrictions on all the styles, or the recommended minimum, or none, or the ones you have check-marked in that very long list of styles in Microsoft Word.

In Editing restrictions, you can choose to allow some sort of modifications to be made by certain people (the Exceptions(optional)) list. You can enter the users that may modify the protected Word document in this option. If you were to click the "More users..." link, it will open a dialog box where you can enter user names that have access to this protected Word document in terms of being able to modify or format it.

Finally, in the Start enforcement, you can click the button labeled "Yes, Start Enforcing Protection". To start the protection. It will then ask you for a password which you can set to whatever you wish.

So now, once someone opens the protected Word document (someone that is not an exception on your list), it will ask them for a password when they try to modify or format the protected Word document. It will not let the user modify the Word document unless the correct password is entered.

And that is how you make a protected Word document. Personally I never use this option because no one else uses my computer, and I never have a Word document which I know for sure I won't be making any changes to. If you did want to make a Word document password-protected, this would be how you do it.