When it comes to productivity suite, there is nothing better than Microsoft Office. Plenty of free programs out there for the job but none of them offer all the security and other advanced features available in Microsoft Office applications.
Microsoft Office comes with plenty of security features. You can easily secure your Office document with a strong password. Most users are well aware of the password protection feature available in Office programs. However, a large section of Office users don’t know the fact that Office lets you protect a selected portion or part of a document, meaning you can prevent others from editing selected portions of a document.
The feature has been present in Office Word 2010, Word 2013 and Word 2016 as well. In this guide, we will show how you can protect and secure a part of Word document and restrict others from editing the same. Once a portion of the document is locked and password protected, users will be able to view the document as well as the locked portion but will not able to edit the locked part.
To protect a part of Word document
Complete the given below instructions to lock down or restrict a portion of the document from editing.
Step 1: Open the Word document and navigate to the page or paragraph that you want to protect from editing.
Step 2: Click on the REVIEW tab and then click Restrict Editing option to open Restrict Editing pane on the right-side of the document.
Step 3: On Restrict Editing pane, check the option labelled Allow only this type of editing in the document and select No changes (Read only) from the drop-down menu to restrict others from editing.
However, if you want to allow commenting or filling in forms, you can select appropriate options from the drop-down menu.
Step 4: Next, select the part or portion of the document that you don’t want to restrict or the part of the document that you don’t want to lock down. For instance, if you want to restrict users from editing the first, third and fourth paragraphs on a page, you need to select the second paragraph.
Step 5: Finally click Yes, Start Enforcing Protection button.
Note that if you want to allow a group or a user to edit the document or portion the document, Office lets you add exceptions. Under Exceptions section, you can add users.
Step 5: When asked, please enter a password and re-enter the same to confirm. That’s it!
Whenever this document is opened again, Word highlights the part that can be freely edited. And as soon as you move the cursor to the protected area, you’ll see “This modification is no allowed because the selection is locked” message.
To unprotect or stop the protection
Step 1: Click anywhere on the protected area of the Word document.
Step 2: Restrict Editing pane should now appear on the right-side of the document with Stop Protection button at the bottom of the pane.
Step 3: Click Stop Protection button and then enter the password to stop the protection or unlock the protected part of the document.
