Restrict or Prevent Editing in MS Word 2010

When you are mailing an important piece of document that you don’t want to be edited or changed by anyone else, did you know that you could restrict people from doing so? Yes, you can keep all your important documents close to the chest and not let anyone change the details in it or edit it. This is an important security feature that’s present in all the applications in the Microsoft Office 2010 suite. Let us see how you can protect your documents.

Earlier we’ve written about Backstage in Microsoft Office 2010 and what you could do with that feature. Here, you’d actually get to use that feature to secure you documents. So to begin the process, you have to click on the ‘File’ tab on the Ribbon on any Microsoft Office 2010 document. Let’s do this on Microsoft Word 2010 for now (You can repeat the same process for other files on different applications of Microsoft Office 2010 too). Once you click on the ‘File’ tab, click on the option ‘Info’ to proceed further.

Once you click on the option ‘Info’ the menu options would change and you’d see the option ‘Permissions’ on the screen. Select the option to get the dropdown menu on the screen. This dropdown menu would have options like ‘Restrict Editing’, ‘Encrypt with Password’. Choose the option ‘Restrict Editing’ to proceed. Once you select that option, a small window would appear on the screen where you’d see the option ‘Limit Formatting to a selection of Styles’. If you check that option in that window, users would not be able to edit the document and you would have control over the document.

You can also elaborate that selection and choose only limited options that readers of the document would have, when they try to edit the document. You can also create exceptions to document and allow a few users to have complete control over the document by giving in their email addresses. This is how you can restrict your documents from being edited by the readers and have complete control over them!