Before you share an important document with someone else, there are couple of
things you can do to finalize and protect it.
You'll find everything you need in the Backstage view.
The Inspect Documents feature will let you remove any hidden personal
information that's stored in the file. It also checks for document elements that
you generally don't want in a final draft; for example, tracked changes that
you forgot to accept or reject. Some of the changes from the inspector can't be
undone so it's a good idea to save an extra copy before you continue.
When you're ready go ahead and click Check for Issues
Choose Inspect Document from the menu
then click Inspect in the dialog box.
The results will appear with an exclamation mark next to anything that
may contain sensitive information.
In this example, it looks like there are some hidden document properties and
personal info and also some comments that I forgot to do we which can happen
when Show Markup for tracked changes is turned off. I definitely don't want these things
in the final draft so I'm going to take this opportunity to remove them.
Click the button to the right that says Remove All
and Word will erase the data instantly.
I'm also going to remove the personal information the inspector found because
the people and sharing with just don't really need access to that.
When you're done, click the Close button.
Now that our document has been finalized, we can protected to prevent people from
making any further changes. This step is optional but it's a great way to control
who's allowed to view or edit your work.
All you have to do is click the Protect Document command and make a selection
from the menu. Some of these options offer a high level of protection such as
Encrypt with Password, which is good for really important or sensitive documents.
If you don't need that much security though you might want to consider one of
the other options.
In this case I'm going to choose Mark as Final, which will make the document read-only.
This will discourage people from making any more changes to the file and also
let them know that this is the final draft.
Once you make your selection, click OK to confirm,
then OK again,
and and the setting will be applied. Now whenever someone opens the file
they'll see this little bar at the top of the window and they won't be able to
type or delete anything.
Now if they do need to make changes they can just click the button that says
Edit Anyway
In short, this option doesn't provide any actual security for your
document, but it's a good way to keep people from changing or deleting
something by accident.
OK, so now you know some ways to finalize and protect your documents before
sending them out to others