Microsoft® Word 2007 Bible

Chapter 49. Security, Tracking, and Comments

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Document protection

• Permissions

• Information Rights Management and word

• Using digital signatures

• Using passwords to protect Word documents

• Inserting comments

• Tracking changes

• Reviewing comments and changes

Not too terribly long ago, about the only way you could protect a Word document was to password-protect it using a password technology that was decidedly easy to crack. Password-cracking solutions abounded and were available free or practically free. Word has come a long way since then and now offers a variety of different kinds of protection that are a lot better than what was available for Word 97 and earlier, although nothing is 100% secure.

Not only does improved technology make protection stronger, but the variety of types of protection has expanded as well. This chapter looks at the types of document protection available to Word users, and describes how to use them. You've already learned how to use Word options and settings to enable and disable running macros and other add-ins, particularly in Chapters 47 and 48. In this chapter, however, the focus is on protecting the privacy and purposes of your documents.

Protection Types

Protection Types

One of the unfortunate things about a piece of software as complicated as Word 2007 is that privacy settings aren't centrally located. This makes discovering the full range of what's available a bit difficult. To save you the trouble of searching all over to find what you can control, ...