All of you might have used Word documents for your projects or any other purpose. It is easy to edit a Word document by anyone when shared with other people. Thus, you might want to restrict the people editing your documents, which is possible with the ‘Restrict Editing’ feature of the word.

If you’re sharing your document with colleagues or friends, you can change it to ‘Read Only’ mode to secure your document.

How to secure your Word document using the ‘Restrict Editing’ feature?

While you can allow access to certain specific people to make changes to your document, you can set your document to ‘Read Only’ mode for others. Enabling this feature will prevent anyone from editing and making changes to your document.

The steps to enable the ‘Restrict Editing’ feature on your word document are:

1. Open the word document for which you want to enable the ‘Restrict Editing’ feature.
2. Click on the ‘Review’ tab from the list of tabs on the top of the screen.
3. In case you don’t want to restrict editing to specific sentences, select the same and click on the ‘Restrict Editing’ option under the ‘Review tab.’
4. A new window will appear with the following options:
   • Formatting Restrictions: Tap on the checkbox for this option to restrict the formatting of the document. You can opt to select the text styles that can only be used.
   • Editing Restrictions: Tap on the checkbox for ‘Allow only this type of editing in the document.’ Next, open the drop-down menu, and select the ‘No Changes (Read Only)’ option. The document will be restricted for editing except for the part that you selected not to restrict.
   • Start Enforcement: To save the changes for your word document, tap on the ‘Yes, Start Enforcing Protection’ button, and a pop-up window will appear. The window will appear with two modes of protection: Password and User Authentication.

Go for the ‘Password’ option to set a passcode for the document, or select the ‘User Authentication’ option to encrypt the document.

The tips for using the ‘Start Enforcement’ option are:

1. Use a little complex password instead of easy ones.
2. You must note down the password somewhere because, once forgotten, it cannot be recovered.
3. If you encrypt the document, no one will be allowed to make changes to the document.

How to enable the protected Word document?

To remove the settings for ‘Restrict editing,’ click on the ‘Stop Protection’ button under the ‘Restrict Editing’ tab.

Source :- Word Document