How to Lock a Word 2013 Document

Word 2010 For Dummies

When you really, really don’t want anyone messing with your Word 2013 document, you can apply some protection. The key is to lock your document. Several levels of protection are available, but you start the journey by following these steps:

On the File screen, choose Info and click the Protect Document button.

Of the several choices, these options are recommended:

Mark As Final: The document is flagged as final, which means that editing is disabled. Still, you can easily override it by clicking the Edit Anyway button that appears.

Encrypt with Password: The document is encrypted and a password is applied. To open the document in Word, you must enter the password. You cannot remove a password after it’s applied.

Restrict Editing: You can limit whether a user can edit a document or whether all changes are tracked or restrict that person to make only comments.

Choose an option and answer the appropriate dialog boxes that appear.

Word gives you options for the type of protection you would like.

Click OK.

The document protection you’ve chosen is applied.

Locking your document is a serious decision! It can’t be reversed if you forget the password.

About This Article

About the book author:

Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
He combines his love of writing with his interest in technology to create books that are informative and entertaining, but not boring. Having sold more than 14 million titles translated into more than 30 languages, Dan can attest that his method of crafting computer tomes does seem to work.
Perhaps Dan’s most famous title is the original DOS For Dummies, published in 1991. It became the world’s fastest-selling computer book, at one time moving more copies per week than the New York Times number-one best seller (although, because it’s a reference book, it could not be listed on the NYT best seller list). That book spawned the entire line of For Dummies books, which remains a publishing phenomenon to this day.
Dan’s most recent titles include PCs For Dummies, 9th Edition; Buying a Computer For Dummies, 2005 Edition; Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies; Dan Gookin’s Naked Windows XP; and Dan Gookin’s Naked Office. He publishes a free weekly computer newsletter, “Weekly Wambooli Salad,” and also maintains the vast and helpful Web site www.wambooli.com.