I'm looking into purchasing Word 2003, and I want to know if some of the
advanced protection features, such as locking the formatting of a document
and locking portions of the doucment, work on previous versions. That is, if
I lock it in 2003, will one of my coworkers who still has 2000 installed be
able to cicrumvent the lock?
In Word 2003 you can indeed lock a document's formatting or lock areas
against editing. When you open that document in any earlier version,
it behaves as if the whole document is protected -- even the portions
that 2003 marked as editable are unavailable.
However, you *can* circumvent this lock in the same way as you can
circumvent ordinary protection from earlier versions -- use Insert >
File to bring the contents of the locked document into an unprotected
document.
Word's document protection, even in 2003, obviously isn't intended to
guard documents against a determined attack by a knowledgeable person.
Microsoft's Information Rights Management uses encryption and is
intended for that sort of application. I've tried it out -- not that
I've tried hard to break it -- and it seems to work much better. See
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA010397891033.aspx for a
description.
