Different Options to Protect Microsoft Office 2016 File

Microsoft Office 2016 has a unique feature to protect the file called Protect Document. This feature helps you to protect the file contents and can also identify what changed and by whole it changed. To view the Protect Document options, open any Microsoft Office 2016 file like the word, excel, or power point and select File => Info => choose Protect Document as shown below. 


There are five different options available to protect the Microsoft Office 2016 document. Those are “Mark As Final”, “Encrypt with Password”, “Restrict Editing”, “Restrict Access”, and “Add a Digital Signature”. Here we discuss each of these feature in-detail. 

Mark As Final: By using this option we can make any Microsoft Office 2016 document as read-only, that means no one can make any changes to the file. But anyone can remove the Mark as Final as an option by going to File => Info => clear Mark as a Final selection. Mark As Final option allows you to tell to all your colleagues that this is the last version of the document. If anyone wants to make changes, they can disable the features and can do changes. 

Encrypt with Password: By using this option, we can set the password for the file. Once we set the password, anyone requires a password to open the file. That means we need to keep track of the password to view and edit the content of the file. 

Restrict Editing: This option opens the restrict and Editing task pane in the document. We can restrict formatting to a selection of styles and specify editing restrictions in the document; we can also make document read-only by using this option. 

Restrict Access: This setting requires that we have to access to a Digital Rights Management(DRM) server. If DRM server is available for any corporate network, we can use this option to assign a specific access level to the specific user. 

Add a Digital Signature:  We can digitally sign the file for authenticity by using this option. To digitally sign a file we need obtain a digital certificate. We can get the digital certificates from an online certificate authority such as Symantec and Digicert. You have to digitally sign the document by using digital certificate before handovring it to others.