Microsoft® Office 2003 Editions Resource Kit

Important Aspects of Password and Encryption Protection

Microsoft Office Excel 2003, Microsoft Office Word 2003, and Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003 offer several features to help restrict access to files through the use of passwords or encryption. These file-level security measures are separate from any operating system–level security options.

The use of file encryption is another method of protecting a document from unauthorized changes versus saving the file in a permissions-enabled hard disk or folder. When saved, the file is scrambled with an encryption code, making the contents of the document unreadable to anyone who does not have the password and ciphers required to decrypt the document. To use encryption, users working with a file ...