Special Edition Using Microsoft® Office XP

Keeping Shared Documents Secure

Before you share an Office document with anyone else—whether by giving an entire department access on your corporate intranet or on the Internet at an FTP or Web site—you should first consider how you're going to protect the document, both from prying eyes and from unwanted changes.

Protecting Office Documents with Passwords

Your first line of defense is to protect the document file itself with a password. That simple precaution will usually keep out casual snoops, and with a little extra attention, you can scramble a document so effectively that only a determined cryptologist could unlock it without knowing the password.

Password protection works by encrypting a file—scrambling its data so it can't be read without ...