So you have important information or formatting in a document that you don't want other users to mess with? Not a problem if you are using Word, which has built-in protection functions. Learn how to control what other users are able to do in a document with the following articles.

Tips, Tricks, and Answers

The following articles are available for the 'Protecting Documents' topic. Click the article''s title (shown in bold) to see the associated article.

   Allowing Only Comments In a Document
Develop a document that is to be reviewed by a group of people, and you may want to protect it in some way. One way you can protect it is to make sure that people can only add comments to the document and not make changes to the text. Here's how to do this trick.

   Allowing Only Form Field Changes
Word allows you to create forms that other people can use to enter information. One of the last steps normally taken with forms is to protect them so that data can only be entered where you specified.

   Documents Lock on Their Own
Do you have documents that seem to be locked when you didn't lock them? There are several possible reasons for this issue, as discussed in this tip.

   Entering a Name in the Header of a Locked Form
When you lock a document as a form, then Word limits what you can do with that document. That includes not being able to change whatever is in the header and footer. This tip explains how you can bypass the need for putting a form field in an area of the document you can't change once the form is protected.

   Locking Table Contents
When you get information in your document "just right," you may want to make sure that others cannot change it. Here's a quick way to protect just a portion of a document, so that a table in that document cannot be changed.

   Protect Your Document Templates
If you want to protect your templates from accidental changes, the best way to do so is by using Windows instead of Word. This tip provides step-by-step instructions on how to make a template read-only, so it can't be changed.

   Protecting Document Areas from Global Replacements
You may have boilerplate text that you need to include in your document, and it would be detrimental to accidently change anything in that text. The solution is to protect the unchangeable text, as described in this tip.

   Recovering Password-Protected Documents
Got a locked document you just need to get into? It may be quite easy (or next to impossible) using the ideas in this tip.

   Signing a Protected Form
Tablet PCs are great for some uses, such as signing forms developed in Word. You may run into a problem with getting the signatures you need if the form is protected. This tip discusses how you can get around this problem.

   Turning Off Document Protection
If you protect your document using the tools that Word provides, at some time you may need to turn off that protection. Here's how easy it is to open the document back up.