Configure document protection settings in Office for Mac 2011
Office for Mac 2011 will reach end of support on October 10, 2017. To stay supported, you will need to upgrade. For more information, see these resources.
Applies to: Office for Mac 2011
Topic Last Modified: 2016-12-16
You can restrict access to documents by using Information Rights Management (IRM) for Outlook 2011, Excel 2011, Word 2011, and PowerPoint 2011.
You can also use password protection features in Word and Excel to prevent unauthorized users from opening or modifying your documents. Review these features with users who send sensitive documents outside the organization or who want to manage document content in a collaborative environment.
IRM in Office for Mac 2011
IRM allows authors to restrict permission for documents, workbooks, presentations, and e-mail messages on a per-person or per-group basis. IRM provides three permission levels: Read, Change, and Full Control. For more information, download the Information Rights Management in Office for Mac 2011 Deployment Guide. This guide describes the steps to set up Active Directory Rights Management Services server on Windows Server 2008 R2 in a test environment, configure this server to work with the Mac clients, and use IRM with Office for Mac 2011.
For information about how end users can set the permission levels for their documents, see the Excel 2011, Word 2011, PowerPoint 2011, and Outlook 2011 Help.
Password protection features in Word for Mac 2011 and Excel for Mac 2011
Users can prevent unauthorized users from opening and modifying documents by password protecting their documents. In this case, the user needs to share the password with other users who are authorized to open or modify the document. Passwords are case-sensitive, so users must type a password exactly as it was created by the document owner.
In Word, users can help prevent unauthorized users from opening a document or from modifying a document even if they have permission to open it. For more information about securing Word documents by using password protection features, see Security and Privacy in Word Help.
In Excel, users can protect specific elements in a sheet, protect an entire sheet, or protect an entire workbook. They can also use passwords to restrict access to an entire workbook or to restrict users to read-only access to a workbook. For more information about securing Excel workbooks and other Excel elements, see Security and Privacy in Excel Help.
Note
Users should store Excel workbooks and sheets in locations that are available only to authorized users. Hidden or locked data is not encrypted in a workbook. Given sufficient time and knowledge, any user can obtain and modify any data in any workbook he or she has access to. To help prevent this, and to help protect confidential information, store workbooks and sheets in secure locations.