Once you are happy with the restriction you wish to enable, click the Start Enforcing Protection button (Figure 5). By default, the Read-only option will apply to all users, but you can easily add specific users in if you are on a corporate domain. The Read-only option does give you the option where you exclude specific people. This will only allow end users to edit text that are in the specific controls we set up earlier. The option we’re interested in is the last option – Filling in Forms. The Tracked Changes option will allow you to edit any of the document, but will force Tracked Changes so any changes made can later be reviewed. The Comments restriction only allows you to enter in comments in the document. You have four options for restricting editing – Read only, Tracked Changes, Comments and Filling in Forms. The Editing restrictions section allows you to do just that. You can also restrict changing of the themes and schemes – enabling this checkbox (Figure 4) will disable the Themes, Colors and Fonts section of the Design tab. By locking this down you can restrict which styles are available to the end user. By default, Word has many different styles to handle how things like paragraphs, bullets and comments look. The first option allows you to restrict changes to the look and feel of the document. We have three options – Formatting Restrictions, Editing Restrictions and Starting Enforcement. Clicking the Restrict Editing button will open a side tab on the right side of the document. Next, we can use the Restrict Editing button on the Developer tab to lock down the document. My sample document can be seen in Figure 3. This will allow users to edit only specific sections of the document once we lock it down. For user input, we will add a Rich Text Content Control. Type in any text you don’t want to be edited. To do so, make sure you are on the Developer tab. Next, we will edit our Word document by adding some editable regions and text that we don’t want to be edited. You should now see the Developer tab show up on the main Ribbon interface (Figure 2). Scroll through the list of Main tabs and check the box next to Developer (Figure 1). In the Word Options window, make sure Main Tabs is selected under the heading Customize the Ribbon.

Right-click on one of the existing menu tabs (Home, Insert, Design, etc.). This tab is called “Developer.” If you open Word and don’t have that tab available, follow these steps to add it in. Before you can lock a Word document, you need to add a new menu tab to the user interface.

How to unlock a document in word