How to Encrypt or Password Protect Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat Documents (PDF)

To protect the contents of your file, you must password protect your documents. You can share the password with the select group of people required to access the file. In this post, we will share how you can encrypt or password protect Microsoft Office and PDF documents.

How to Encrypt or Password Protect Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat Documents (PDF)

Microsoft Office tools can be easily password protected within Windows itself. But there are several ways to password protect a PDF using various tools such as Adobe Acrobat, I Love PDF, Soda, etc. These tools allow you to encrypt an existing PDF. S, let’s see how to do it.

1. Password protection of Microsoft Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint)
2. Password Protecting Adobe Acrobat Documents (PDF)

You can encrypt or password protect Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat PDF documents using the appropriate methods.

1] Password Protect Microsoft Office Documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint)

The password protection feature is common to most Microsoft Office applications. We are using Microsoft Office Word here, but the same applies to Excel, PowerPoint, and others.

• Open the Office document you want to protect
• Click on the “File”tab. On the Info tab, click the Protect Document drop-down menu. Click on the “Encrypt with Password”option.

• Enter the password you want to use to protect the document. Re-enter your password when prompted and click OK.
• You will receive a message asking you to save the document. If you click Save, the document will be password protected. If you click Don’t Save, the latest copy of the document will be available, allowing you to temporarily access it.

Note. If you forget your password, you will not be able to open the document without the correct password.

• Your document will ask for a password the next time you open it.

2] How to Password Protect Adobe Acrobat Documents (PDF)

You must have a Pro subscription to use Adobe Acrobat to password protect PDF files. That’s a lot for those who only want to protect data. Instead, you can password protect any existing Adobe Acrobat PDF document using these two third party tools below:

I love PDF

• Open the I Love PDF website and click the “Choose PDF File”button on the screen.
• Select the desired PDF file and click Open. You will be prompted to set a password for your PDF to protect it. Set a password for the PDF file and click the “Protect PDF”button.
• Click the Download Secure PDFs button to download a password-protected PDF file.
• After you download the file, navigate to the file’s destination, open the PDF file, and you’ll be prompted for a password to open it securely.

Soda

• Open Soda and click the CHOOSE FILE button. Select the desired PDF file and click Open.
• Enter a password to protect the file on the next page and click the “Protect”button.
• Click the UPLOAD FILE button to download the password-protected PDF file. You can navigate to the downloaded PDF file and open it. It will ask you for your password to view the contents of the file.

Remember to upload sensitive data to these websites; if you need professional services, it’s always better to upload PDFs containing such content to paid PDF solutions.

Conclusion

Protecting important documents with a password can help keep them secure. You can easily password protect Microsoft Office applications such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

The same result can be achieved with the help of third-party applications. Also, remember to only use trusted apps if the documents are too sensitive.