One easy way to protect your Word document is to make it read-only. In this scenario, anyone who opens your Word document will be prompted to view it in read-only mode by default.

Protect Word documents using Restrict Editing The unrestricted parts in the document can be made available to anyone, or you can allow permission to certain users only to edit or make changes.

Want to protect an important Word document or Excel spreadsheet? Here's how to add a password, make documents read-only, and tap into other tricks to safeguard sensitive files.