We all need some privacy in our lives and so does our documents, and Microsoft Word is one such software we tend to use the most while creating documents. There can be plenty of reasons for keeping your data in the document secure and safe, be it privacy reasons or others, and what better to encrypt your documents using a password.

How to password-protect a Word Document

It is pretty straightforward to do so, and we will tell you how to do so in Office 365, which also works in Office 2016 as well.

• First of all, you would need to open the word document you need to encrypt. Just browse to the location and double-click to open the document.
• Once, the document opens, click on File on the upper left corner of the Word Window.
• Then under the Info sub-section, choose the Protect Document
• From the drop-down menu, click on Encrypt with Password.
• A window by the name of Encrypt Document would pop-up where you shall need to enter a case-sensitive password to secure the document.
• You would be prompted to re-enter the password for validation purposes, and then you just have to click on OK.
• Just save the document and then close it.
• The next time you open the document, you would need to enter the password you typed in to encrypt the document, and press Enter.

How to remove the password from a Word-Document

This is fairly simple too.

• Just open the password protected document and type in the password.
• Once, the document opens, again click on File on the upper left corner of the Word Window.
• Then under the Info sub-section, again choose the Protect Document
• From the drop-down menu, again click on Encrypt with Password.
• When the next Window pops up, just erase all the dots meant to hide the password and just press
• Don’t forget to save the document and then close it.
• The next time you open the document, you won’t need to provide a password.

A piece of advice

It should be noted that any password you set, should be complex and not a common password, else it could be cracked easily. You should also be able to remember it though, since there isn’t any easy to recover or retrieve data from a password protected Word file, without the help of a professional.