Microsoft Office allows you to password protect various documents that it supports so that not just anybody can open and view these documents. When you password protect a Word document , it will encrypt the contents of that Word document. The contents become accessible only after you enter the correct password. This is similar to encrypting a document using software like AXCrypt but instead of using any external tool it relies on the in-built Microsoft Office encryption features.
The encryption and password protection of Microsoft Office documents is needed only until you do not want any unauthorized or undesired access by unwanted users to them. Once that phase has expired and you no longer have to protect your documents, then you can safely remove the password protection from them. Here is how you can do that:
- Open the password protected document in Microsoft Office. In this example, we are going to open a password protected Microsoft Word document.
- Click on the File and then select Info. If the document is protected, then you would see a message “A password is required to open this document”.
- Click on Protect Document and select Encrypt with Password from the drop-down list that shows up.
- A window will pop up in which you have to enter the password. If the document is already password protected then the password field will have many dots inside it. Remove all these dots and clear the password field. Then click on the OK button to save the blank password.
- The blank password is same as no password. This will remove the password protection from the Microsoft Office documents. The next time you open this document, you will not be prompted for any passwords.
If you no longer need the password protection for Microsoft Office documents, then you can simply remove the password from these documents to make it very convenient for you to work with them.