Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 2007 and 2010. If you are using an earlier version (Word 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Word, click here: Protect Your Document Templates.

Protect Your Document Templates

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated January 10, 2022)
This tip applies to Word 2007 and 2010

As you work with templates, you begin to realize that they are very valuable tools. As such, they should be protected—particularly if other people use your computer. To protect a document template from being changed or deleted, you should make the template file read-only. This is easily done from within Windows (not Word) by following these steps:

Make sure you don't have the document template open in Word. (If there is any doubt, simply close Word.)
Use My Computer to locate the template file you want to protect.
Right-click on the name of the template file you want to protect. Word displays a Context menu.
Choose Properties from the Context menu. Word displays a Properties dialog box for the file.
Click your mouse on the General tab, if necessary. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. The General tab of the Properties dialog box.

Make sure the Read-only check box is selected.
Click on OK.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (11276) applies to Microsoft Word 2007 and 2010. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Protect Your Document Templates.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen...

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What is two more than 7?

2020-06-17 02:46:24

jao1310

Hi,

We have a corporate template in Word and my manager wants to restrict staff from changing the styles in the templates but would like to still have access on the basic formatting tools (such as the font style and breaks in page setup). I would've thought that it's not possible as restricting style formatting would not make sense if you can still access the basic formatting tools. However, I am not an expert in Word so, I just want to ask you if you know another way to protect the styles from being edited while the user will still have access to basic formatting tools.

2012-02-13 09:51:32

Art Hendrickson

You might also password protect the template. Combining password protect (Word) with read only (Windows) suppresses the Word prompt to enter the password to change the template.

The added benefit of password protect and read only is some errant program (e.g., malware) that changes read only to read/write does not compromise the template.

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