Secure Your Private Word 2007 Documents

If you are worried about sensitive data in your Microsoft Word document you can both encrypt and password protect the document to keep it secure. This feature is very useful if you have to store your documents in a shared location, such as a network folder or home computer.

To encrypt your document, click on the Microsoft Office Button in the upper left hand corner, select Prepare from the left-hand menu and then choose Encrypt Document.

In the Encrypt Document dialog window type in your password for this document.

You will then need to enter in your password again for verification and click OK. You will not receive any type of confirmation message, this window will simply disappear.

By default Windows Office Word 2007 will save your document with 128-bit advanced encryption.  Now when anyone goes to open the document it will automatically ask for the password.

That’s all there is to it.

Mysticgeek is the resident IT expert at How-To Geek and a huge rock music fan. His daily articles can be found at Mysticgeek's Realm. This article was written on 06/7/07 and tagged with: Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word

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Comments (2)

1. December 10, 2008 5:58 pm
   Scott

   Question: Does encryption affect backup programs? I’ve had trouble restoring encrypted files before.

2. December 15, 2008 7:11 pm
   jd2066

   @Scott: It depends on what program you use to encrypt the files.
   For things like the Microsoft Office encryption this article shows there would be no problem as on the hard drive, the file is always stored as encrypted and the back up program could back up and restore the bits of the file just fine. For things like EFS (Encrypting File System) that is built in Windows then there could be problems due to the file encrypted/decrypted status being able to change on the fly when the file is accessed. If a backup program runs under a different user account then Windows will say access denied to the program by default. Should the backup be able to just back up the encrypted bits of EFS Encrypted files then for a restore you also need to make sure to restore a back up copy of the EFS Certificates that EFS needs to decrypt the file.