Do you really know what you know? For example......
Just think for a while that you want to send a very important word document for review (or whatever reason) but you want to make sure that document should not be editable by the recipient.
How do you achive this? Think.
Here is the trick.
1.Write the document as usual.
2. When you finish writing the document, save it. Now save it as another document to make a copy of the original document. Why so? Read on to find out!
3. Move your cursor to the end of the document.
4. From Tools menu, choose Customise. A dialog appears listing available toolbars. If it is not already selected, choose the Forms toolbar by enabling the checkbox next to it. Click on close button.
5. Now you will see the Forms Toolbar.
6. This toolbar allows you to make fill-in-the-blanks type of forms within a word document. We will not go into the details of these types of forms in this article. But for now, just click on the first toolbar button from left (where ab is written). The tool tip for this button is “Text form field”.
7. Now at the cursor a small grey patch will appear. This is the text entry form field.
8. Double click on this grey patch. A dialog will appear. In this dialog, clear the check box labelled “Fill-in enabled”. Close the dialog by a click on the Ok button.
9. The grey area will continue to appear. To remove the grey shading, click on the Form Field Shading button on the toolbar. Now the grey shading will disappear. In effect, the field is no longer noticeable.
10. Now all that you need to do is to protect the document. To do this, choose Tools - Protect Document... menu option. Another dialog appears.
11. Choose the Forms option and enter a password and choose Ok button. You will be asked to re-enter the password with a detailed warning. Take the warning seriously. Believe me, you yourself cannot edit the document if you forget the password! Now you know why I asked you to save the original document with protection. In case you forget the protection password (which all of us do very efficiently time and again ), you have a safe editable copy at hand!
12. Now, in order to prevent unauthorised access, choose File-Save As option and Select Tools - Security options tab to enter the regular Password to Open. This password should be different than the form protection password you entered earlier. The password to open will need to be communicated to the intended recipient. So the document protection password should be different.
13. Now save and close the document.
Nothing great seems to have happened yet. Actually it has, but it is not apparent. To see the magic, follow these steps:
1. Open the document.
2. Enter the password to open. The document opens as usual. Contents are seen.
3. Now try editing the document. Sorry, you can’t.
4. Try highlighting the text. No luck
5. Try select all from Edit menu, sorry again. The option is disabled!
6. Try all the things you can think of to select and copy the text. Sorry. Nothing works.
7. Try the Save As option. While saving as, you can of course remove the Password to open. But
that is your risk because, you are making the document prone to unauthorised use. But yes, in our quest to make the document editable, let us try that also. Remove the Open password. Save it as another document.
8. Open this newly saved document and again try to select/copy the text. Sorry sir. Does not work.
Now, of course we are all techies, we know programming. We know the Word object model. So let us try to get the text programmatically. Incidentally, the simplest way to get all the text in the document and paste it into another document is as follows. Assume that there are two documents open. One document contains text (filled.doc) and another document is blank (blank.doc)
Here is the code to get all the text from filled.doc into blank.doc documents(“blank.doc”).range.Text = _ documents(“filled.doc”).Range.Text
Simple and effective, isn’t it.
Now with this knowledge, try to do the same with the protected document. Let us say our protected document was called “safe.doc”. Open the safe.doc and try the following code.
documents(“blank.doc”).range.Text = _
documents(“safe.doc”).Range.Text
Now, you are almost sure it would work. Tough luck! You get a very nice error as shown below.
The only way to duplicate this document and make changes to it is to visually see the original document and re-type all the text and formatting! Of course this can be done but it is so much more difficult now!
The technology behind the trick:
The technology lies in the fill-in-the-blanks form fields of Word. When you have a form that has a fixed layout and content and some variable data entry, like say a Leave Request Form, you use the form fields. Now in order to make sure that end users enter only the form field data and not change the base form text, you have to protect the document using a password. That is what we did. However, we did not want to use the form field at all. It was a dummy field. So we disabled the fill-in feature of the form field (the grey coloured text box). Now nothing is editable in the document. And that is why all the features related to editing—typing, cut, paste, select all, mouse based text selection—were disabled. So we achieved our purpose effectively.
Did you like the above trick?. Do you want to know more tricks and tips?
The above trick is given by Dr. Nithin Paranjape which is published in expresscomputer online magazine.
[Dr. Nitin Paranjape who used to write techforum column in express computer magazine longback. He is the Chairman and MD of Maestros (Mediline). He is a consultant with many organisations, covering appropriate technology utilisation, business application of relevant technology, application architecture and audit as well as knowledge transfer. He has authored more than 650 articles on various technology-related subjects. He can be contacted at nitin@mediline.co.in.]
[Thanks to Dr. Nithin and Express computer online magazine]
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