Apply Password Protection to Microsoft Office Documents

Some of the Microsoft Office documents have sensitive or private information and thus need to be protected from being accessed by just about any person. You can protect them as you would protect some other files on a Windows PC – by encrypting them with the help of a third party tool like AESCrypt which offers very strong encryption using the AES cipher. But since Microsoft Office offers in-built password protection and encryption for all types of supported documents, then why not use this feature to encrypt and password protect your Office documents. You can see how simple it is to password protect any Microsoft Office document:

  1. Open the Office document that you want to password protect in Microsoft Office. It does not matter what type of document it is – Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Access – password protection is supported for them all.
  2. In the Office window, select File and then select Info from the left side.Password Protect Office Documents
  3. Click on Protect Document and then select Encrypt with Password from the drop-down menu.
  4. Enter a password in the small window that appears on the screen. This is the password that you would be needing to open this document later on, so be careful in choosing the password. Password should be easy to memorize yet should not be easy to guess or crack through brute-force techniques. You can use the password generated through Norton Password Generator, if you cannot think of a good one.Password Protect Office Documents
  5. After entering the password twice, you have to save the document. For this, you can simple click on the Save button and it is now fully encrypted.Password Protect Office Documents

Now when you open this document at any time (or someone else tries to open, for that matter), Microsoft Office will ask you for a password. Without supplying the correct password, the document will fail to open.