Can a Word Document be Locked For Editing and Printing

[Guest]

Hi All,

We currently have a process at work for our Quailty Assurance manuals to
convert them to (Adobe) PDF format, so that the team must read them online,
and can't edit them or print them (requirement of the QA system).

But it's a hassle, every time we need to update the documents!

So is there a way to achieve the same within Word, either manually or via VBA?

Any help would be really appreciated,

Thanks in advance,

Paul fenton.

 

[Jezebel]

You're flogging a dead horse both ways. Turning your documents into PDFs
does *not* prevent people editing or printing them. (The simplest method to
bypass PDF security is to download one of the freebie Acrobat clones, most
of which simply ignore the document security settings.) On top of which,
anything that can be displayed can be duplicated, edited, or printed in any
number of ways.

If your company's quality system actually relies on this policy, find the QA
manager and remove his/her kneecaps -- they are a disgrace to the
profession. (And that's not meant flippantly. One of the root causes of the
Bhopal disaster was cruddy documentation -- in that case the Union Carbide
QA manager killed 20,000 people and wrecked the lives of another 600,000.)

Apart from that, yes, you can apply an editing password to a Word document;
and you can muck around with macros to bypass the print commands. And you
will achieve nothing at all.