How To Password Protect and Encrypt Office 2016 Documents

If you use Microsoft Office products such as Word 2016, Excel 2016 and PowerPoint 2016 to prepare sensitive information; did you know it’s simple to add a layer of encryption to your documents, spreadsheets, and presentations?  The feature is built right into the Microsoft Office suite, and it’s quick and easy to use, as I’ll show you below. For those of you who’ve not yet made the investment into the latest Office suite, we’ve covered this information for previous versions of Office so feel free to check out our previous article for those instructions.

When password protecting your documents keep in mind some essential tips:


1. Create a strong passphrase or password when protecting your documents. A passphrase is nice as it hopefully will prevent you from forgetting your password.

2. Use a unique password, don’t use the same password you use to sign into your Windows PC or another service. This is important just in case your user account is compromised, your files have at least a hope of protection.

3. If you’re going to encrypt a lot of office documents, consider using a password manager. Our favorite here at groovyPost is 1Password.

READ SUGGESTION - Facebook rolls out opt-in encryption for 'secret' Messenger chats

4. By default, Office 2016 / O365 uses AES 256 bit encryption which for 99% of us out there is good enough. If you’re looking to change the default in any way, I encourage you to check out this TechNet article which reviews the cryptography options in detail.

Protect Office 365 or Office 2016 Files Using Encrypt with Password

The procedure is standard for most Office applications, so for this article, we will use Microsoft Word 2016 to start. First, open the Office document you would like to protect.

1. Click the File menu, select the Info tab, then select the Protect Document button. Click Encrypt with Password.

2. Enter your password then click OK.

3. Enter the password again to confirm it and click OK.

Microsoft Word will now indicate the document is protected. Each time you open the document, you will be prompted to enter your password to access its contents.

Source - groovypost

Share on Google Plus

About HNO

This is a short description in the author block about the author. You edit it by entering text in the "Biographical Info" field in the user admin panel.