Protecting a form once completed so as others cannot edit

[Guest]

I have a travel request form which employees complete. Once completed, the
manager places an electronic signature in one of the boxes (insert/picture).
However, when I try and protect this particular section so as no-one can copy
the signature, all of the completed boxes disappear?

 

[Graham Mayor]

If you think that protecting a signature inserted as a graphic will stop
someone copying the signature, you are dreaming. *Anything* you allow
someone to see can be copied.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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[Guest]

Then what is the point of having any protection at all?!? A copy can be
made, changes made, and the original replaced?

What would you suggest?

 

[Stefan Blom]

See:

How to change the behaviour of Word's document protection, so users’
formfields don't get reset when they unprotect and reprotect
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/MacrosVBA/TurnFmFlfResetOff.htm

Of course, this won't solve the underlying problem that Graham was
referring to.

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Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP


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[Graham Mayor]

Protection in a form is to prevent accidental changes to the original form
and to allow the fields to be used as text entry receptacles.
It does not stop anyone from extracting the content of the document and
re-using it.

Protection against *opening* a document will prevent casual opening of the
document without the password, but for anyone who has the password the
document is their's to do with as they wish.

This is the same for any medium, and is why efforts to prevent (say) the
copying of video or audio material are always doomed to failure.


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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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[Jay Freedman]

This misunderstanding is so common that we should suggest (demand?)
that Microsoft change the terminology. Instead of "Protect Document"
it should be something like "Activate Form". Only the geeks on the
development team think of it as protecting the text outside the form
fields; everyone else thinks of it as switching from design mode to
operating mode.

There is in fact one variety of "protection" that actually does
provide control over what others can do with your document:
Information Rights Management (IRM)
(http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/office/office2003/operate/of03irm.mspx).
Unless you have a company server running Windows Server 2003 and the
IRM server software, though, that's pretty much a nonstarter.

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Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
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[Graham Mayor]

There is in fact one variety of "protection" that actually does
provide control over what others can do with your document:

But would it stop scrolling screen capture and OCR?
I thought not. If you can see it you can copy it.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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[Jay Freedman]

I have no way to test it to find out, but you're probably correct.