Don’t you hate how you put lots of effort into a Word 2007 document, and then you see one of your colleagues play around with the formatting, or accidentally delete an important section.

Or maybe you want to force users of your document to only edit certain parts – for example if you have built a form that you want people to fill in.

Well in Word 2007 there is a great feature which can literally protect the important parts of your document, and restrict them from being changed, edited or deleted.  Funnily enough, it is called “Protect Document”

So how do you protect a Word 2007 document?

1) Create your document

2) Make sure you can see the “Developer” tab in the Ribbon.  If you can, move to step three!  If not, you need to click on the “Office Orb” in the top left hand corner, then click on “Word Options”, and finally whilst in the “Popular” section, make sure you check “Show Developer tab in the Ribbon”

3) Click on the “Developer” tab in the Ribbon

4) Look for the “Protect” group, and click on “Protect Document”

5) Click on “Restrict Formatting and Editing”

6) Look at the right hand side.  You will now see a task pane which will talk you through all the different formatting and editing restrictions you can put in place.  Select your favourite settings, and when you are ready…

7) Click on “Yes, Start Enforcing Protection”

Now if your employer has gone to the lengths of implementing an Information Rights Management system, there are a few other extra restrictions you can put in place, which you will find when you click on the “Protect Document” button in the Ribbon.  They are out of the scope of this article and I am sure I will write about them in the future as more and more organisations implement IRM.

So there you have it – now you can sleep at night knowing that no one is messing with your document!

‘till next time!
TNP

Related posts:

1. Insert a “Date Picker” into your Word 2007 document
2. Protect a Sheet in Excel 2007
3. Word 2007: What is the Prepare Menu? Deep Dive
4. More than just word count – All the document statistics you want in Word 2007 using Status Bar Configuration
5. Select similarly formatted text in Word 2007