Password Protect MS Office 2010

How to Password Protect Microsoft Office 2010

June 09, 2013 10:36 am / Posted by Michael Eric to Office Tricks
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It is fairly necessary to set a password to protect your Office 2010 document from unauthorized viewing, especially for personal and confidential documents. In this post we detail you how to password protect Microsoft Office 2010 as well as how to remove Office 2010 password protection.

How to Password Protect Office 2010 (including Excel, Word, PPT, Access and Outlook)

The steps to password protect Access and Outlook passwords are slightly different from those of Excel, Word and PPT. As a result we'll divide this part into 3 sessions explaining separately how to set password for these MS Office 2010 documents.

Note: If you have got password protect Office 2010 documents but forgot the password, you could decrypt the password with Office Password Recovery.

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Section I. Password Protect Excel, Word, and PPT in Office 2010

Steps to password protect Word 2010, Excel 2010 and PPT 2010 are similar. We take Word for example in the demo.

1. In an open Word document, click File > Info > Protect Document.
Note: For Excel 2010, click File > Info > Protect Workbook.
For PPT 2010, click File > Info > Protect Presentation.
2. Tap Encrypt with Password, and the Encrypt Document dialog box appears. In the Password box, type a password. Important: Microsoft cannot retrieve lost or forgotten passwords, so keep a list of your passwords and corresponding file names in a safe place.

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Section II. Password Protect Access 2010

1. Launch Access 2010 and On File menu click Open.
2. Select the database file on which you want to add protection and from Open options click Open Exclusive, as shown in the screenshot below.
3. Navigate to File tab and in backstage view click Encrypt With Password. The rest steps are the same as that in section I.

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Section III. Password Protect Outlook 2010

1. Click Tools->Options->Mail setup tab->E-mail Accounts.
2. Highlight the outlook account, click Change.
3. Click More settings.
4. In Security tab, uncheck the box "Always prompt for logon credentials"
5. Restart Outlook.

Added Tips: How to Remove Office 2010 Password Protect

As we just talked about how to encrypt Office 2010 files, what should we do if we just forgot the password?

Office 2010 employs AES and a 128-bit key for password protection, a strong encryption method. There is no way to remove the password protection without a professional tool. Office 2010 Password Recovery might be a good choice. It employs 3 types of attacks: Brute-force attack, Brute-force with mask attack and Dictionary attack. Steps to use are pretty simple and straightforward. You can feel free to download and have a try.

password protect office 2010 files