Do you share your PC or laptop with someone or do you work in a location where other people can access your data quite easily? If your answer is yes, then you ought to keep your important documents secured and protected. This is important in preventing unauthorized access to your confidential documents.

These documents may consist of MS Word documents, Excel sheets, PDF files, Notepad files, your project report and other sensitive documents which are important for running your business properly.

Even though, MS Word and MS Excel permit you to assign a password to your important files without requiring any specialized password protecting software. However, this is not a reliable way to secure your files and folders as this password protection can be breached quite easily.

The better option to secure your office documents and financial reports is to use file encryption software. In this article, we explain how you can protect your documents with or without a software.

First, let us have a look at how you can protect your document without any specialized file security software.

• From the Tools menu click Options.
• Click “Security” tab.
• Set a password which can be found in File Encryption Options for This Document.
• For better security try choosing a strong password which is hard for others to guess.
• Now, you can assign some additional choices by clicking the Advanced button. This will open a dialogue box.
• Click “OK” to your way back out.

It is recommended that you do not choose common things as your password, for example; your name, birthday, zodiac sign, pet name, telephone numbers etc. It is always recommended that you choose a combination of alphanumeric characters as your password because it will be harder for anyone to guess.

You can also protect your data by using specialized file encryption software that will not only prevent unauthorized access to your documents but will also protect them from getting deleted and modified without your permission.