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MS Office Forum / Word / Programming / March 2005Lock docs and throw away the key...and related VBA
Couple of questions about locking word docs. The main question is: how can I protect a word doc, and make sure it can never be edited again? I have written VBA code that sets the doc (word 2000) to "comments only" which is the most protectd of the settings offered (word 2003 seems to have an additional protection setting, ReadOnly or something of that sort). The VBA code to protect the doc is run when the user clicks a custom commandbar button, which is fine, but the VBA and the embedded "protect" password remain visible if the user opens the module. Thus one solution would seem to be to get rid of the VBA modules, which luckily are expendable at that point. Doable? Any other/better approaches? Thanks What are you actually trying to achieve? There's no way to make a bullet-proof, locked-in-concrete document. Apart from the relatively easy matter of hacking the document, users can always OCR the screen image, or just retype the thing from scratch. > Couple of questions about locking word docs. > [quoted text clipped - 11 lines] > > Thanks As we tell people in these newsgroups at least once a week, NO, there is no way to protect Word documents absolutely. Certainly there is no way to do so through VBA, because the macro security mechanism can disable your macros without a second thought. Word is first and foremost an *editor*, a tool for changing documents. Beyond that, even if you locked down every facility Word has for editing, saving, printing, etc., there's always the Windows PrintScreen key followed by OCR. If anyone can see your document, there's a way to copy it, and from there it's a small step to produce an altered version. You might want to look into Microsoft's Information Rights Management stuff, or producing protected PDF documents. -- Regards, Jay Freedman Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org >Couple of questions about locking word docs. > [quoted text clipped - 11 lines] > >Thanks Hi, thanks to both of you for responding...I did look here for clues first, in fact got my tips about protect routines from here. Oddly, google found very little for me to chew on... "lock doc" returns all of six threads. I tried others too, anyways... It's not a concern re someone copying the doc, it's a concern about preventing changes to the doc after a final edit. I'm not sure it has to be bulletproof, just less than silly, like my current attempt (setting protect, and leaving the vba code with pswd intact). If I have to move them to pdf I'll do that. However the users of these docs don't like pdf because they are so slow to load. I've read somewhere that the reason pdf's are slow loading is that adobe loads a ton of addins with the default setup, but I've not tried tweaking that yet. > As we tell people in these newsgroups at least once a week, NO, there > is no way to protect Word documents absolutely. Certainly there is no [quoted text clipped - 31 lines] > > > >Thanks PDFs are certainly a simple solution for the situation you describe. Puzzled by your concern about speed. The full version of Acrobat is a little slower than Word to load, but not much. And the reader is quicker. What add-ins? > Hi, thanks to both of you for responding...I did look here for clues > first, in fact got my tips about protect routines from here. Oddly, [quoted text clipped - 49 lines] >> > >> >Thanks Hi - I've not checked out the add-ins yet, I gathered the notion about them from a mag or net article about why Adobe reader was so slow loading. Looks like it's time to do the pdf thing. I'll need to gen the pdf via code; the only option I've looked at so far is Amyuni...any others that you've worked with and like? Thanks for your input. It always makes me laugh when I see people write "usenet is dead"! > PDFs are certainly a simple solution for the situation you describe. Puzzled > by your concern about speed. The full version of Acrobat is a little slower [quoted text clipped - 37 lines] > >> Jay Freedman > >> Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org I think he's talking about the full Acrobat version indeed. Kiln, if there are "slow" machines in your network, why not use Acrobat Reader Version 5.0? Version 6.0 is a bit heavier, so why not stick to version 5.0? It works fine for me on my "slow"machine. And creating a pdf file from MSWord can be done with a free pdf creator tool like CutePdf or a simular free program. Good Luck, Emmy > Couple of questions about locking word docs. > [quoted text clipped - 11 lines] > > Thanks Actually what they have on this site is simple the acrobat reader. I'm not sure what version it is, but it's slow enough to annoy them. However The priority has to be with the ability to lock the documents, so looks like pdf is the way forward. I have to gen the pdf's via code, does CutePDF offer that? Open to any suggestions you have, Amyuni is the one I've looked at so far. > I think he's talking about the full Acrobat version indeed. > Kiln, if there are "slow" machines in your network, why not use Acrobat [quoted text clipped - 21 lines] > > > > Thanks
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