Encrypting a Word document with a Password

Encrypting a Word document is the process of protecting it from unauthorized access. It is a good idea to encrypt MS Word documents if you are going to send them over email or upload them on the internet.

There are two ways to encrypt MS Word documents with passwords. One way is to use the built-in encryption feature of MS Word and the other way is to use third party encryption software like WinZip, 7-Zip, or WinRAR.

If you have a MS Word document that you want to keep private or secret you can do that by assigning a password it.

Follow these steps for encrypting a Word document:

(1) Create a MS Word 2007 document.

(2) Select Office Button > Prepare > Encrypt Document to display the Encrypt Document dialog box:

(3) Type a PASSWORD (case sensitive). But be VERY CAREFUL: if you lose this password, there’s no way to open this document again!

(4) Click OK to close this first dialog box and display the password confirmation dialog box:

(5) Click OK to close the dialog box.

(6) Save and close your document.

(7) Try to open it, and MS Word will prompt you with the password:

If you can’t get it right, you can say goodbye to your document. That’s the only bad thing about this Word functionality.

Summary

In this blog post, we learned how to encrypt a MS Word document with a password.

Encryption is the process of converting information (referred to as plaintext) into an unreadable form (called ciphertext). To be readable again, encrypted information must be decrypted. When you encrypt a document, you are using an encryption algorithm to convert the document’s text from readable English into a scrambled code that only someone who knows the encryption key can decipher.