Before you share an important document with colleagues or clients, there are a couple
things you can do to finalize and protect it.
You'll find everything you need in the backstage view… under Protect Document and Inspect
Document.
Inspect Document will let you remove any hidden personal information that's stored in the
file itself.
It'll also check for document elements that you generally don't want in the 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 delete (which can happen when markup is turned off).
I definitely don't want these in the final draft, so I'm going to take this opportunity
remove them.
Just 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 I'm
sharing the document with don't really need access to it.
Now that our document has been finalized, we can protect it 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 this is the final draft.
Once you make your selection, click OK to confirm… then OK again… and the protection
will be applied.
Now when somebody 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.
If they do need to make changes, they can click the button that says Edit Anyway.
In short, this option doesn't provide any actual security for your document; however,
it's a good way to keep people from changing or deleting something by accident.
Now you know how to finalize and protect your documents using the features in the backstage
view.