The sharing feature offered by MS Word allows you to share your important documents and files with others in an easy & convenient way. Sometimes, situations occur when you want to maintain the confidentiality of the file and prevent your important documents from being edited by any unauthorized user.

For the reason, MS Word provides you with a brilliant option to make your important files and documents safeguarded from unauthorized access. There are numerous options available to protect your documents from others, but in this article we are discussing on how to lock editing for MS Word documents and below mentioned are the steps that help you to enforce restrictions on your documents:

To begin with, open the MS word document on which you want to restrict editing. Go to the Review tab and click on the option Restrict Editing.

Restrict Editing option

At the right side bar, you will see restricting formatting and editing pane that provides numerous options to restrict editing. Under formatting restrictions enable limit formatting to a selection of styles option. Click settings to configure advance options. This allows you to prevent others from modifying styles and change formatting of the document.

  • The formatting enables numerous other options that lets you Allow AutoFormat usage that overrides formatting restrictions, block quick style set switching etc. To continue, click OK.
  • Also, you can enable allow only this type of editing in the document from the editing restrictions and from the list, you can choose the desired option.
  • When you feel the need that the users require to edit a portion of the document, then select the content. In Exceptions, select the users you want to give permission of editing. Click on more users to add users for this.
  • From start enforcement, click yes and lock the editing to protect document from any unauthorized users.
  • Also, you can make your document password protected by entering a paraphrase. You can enable user authentication if you want to allow the authorized users to remove protection when they want to edit it.
  • If someone will try to edit the document, restrict formatting will appear, but they can find the regions which they can edit.
  • Click Stop Protection when you want to disable protection. Now, enter password to verify that you are an authenticated user.

Restrict Editing in MS Word