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Providing Access Security for Office Documents

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This content is no longer actively maintained. It is provided as is, for anyone who may still be using these technologies, with no warranties or claims of accuracy with regard to the most recent product version or service release.

You can provide access security for Office documents in three ways:

  • In Word and Excel, you can set passwords that are required before any user can open or modify the document. Similarly, in Access, you can set a password that is required to open a database; for information about setting a database password, see Chapter 18, "Securing Access Databases." PowerPoint, Outlook, and FrontPage don't provide password protection for documents.

  • For all Office documents, you can use the file-system access-control features of operating systems and Web servers to control what users can do with documents.

  • In Word, Excel, Access, FrontPage, Outlook, and PowerPoint, you can control access to VBA code by setting a password that is required to view the code in the Visual Basic Editor.