How to disable the cut, copy & paste feature in a certain Word doc

[Stacia S]

I work in the legal dept for a major healthcare system. In an effort to
reduce costs and to become more efficient we have made several process
changes - one being that we send out contracts via email, thus eliminating
postage and courier costs. One thing that has happened over and over is that
once we send out a contract, people on the other side will make changes
without using the track changes feature so we will be aware of chages. Of
course, once the document is returned to us we see the changes, which in turn
creates a lot of extra time to have documents re-drafted, re-reviewed and
re-signed. To eliminate this, I came up with the idea of password protecting
each document for track changes and/or setting it up as a read-only document
with a password to modify. This has helped a great deal, but even with these
measures in place, we have had a couple of instances where someone copied and
pasted the entire document into a new document and was able to make changes.

I know there is a way to disable the cut, copy and paste feature, but I need
instructions on how to do it. I will need to perform this function over and
over, so please keep that in mind as well. Our organization is cutting
expenses, so I need to find a way to keep our documents secure, with the
tools we already have. I'm a pretty good software program user, I know a lot
of tricks, but I am a novice at VBA and macros. I have only used it a couple
of times and I had to have detailed step, by step instructions.

Any help on setting up the code for this and any other suggestions on ways
we can protect our documents from modifications will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[Jay Freedman]

I work in the legal dept for a major healthcare system. In an effort to
reduce costs and to become more efficient we have made several process
changes - one being that we send out contracts via email, thus eliminating
postage and courier costs. One thing that has happened over and over is that
once we send out a contract, people on the other side will make changes
without using the track changes feature so we will be aware of chages. Of
course, once the document is returned to us we see the changes, which in turn
creates a lot of extra time to have documents re-drafted, re-reviewed and
re-signed. To eliminate this, I came up with the idea of password protecting
each document for track changes and/or setting it up as a read-only document
with a password to modify. This has helped a great deal, but even with these
measures in place, we have had a couple of instances where someone copied and
pasted the entire document into a new document and was able to make changes.

I know there is a way to disable the cut, copy and paste feature, but I need
instructions on how to do it. I will need to perform this function over and
over, so please keep that in mind as well. Our organization is cutting
expenses, so I need to find a way to keep our documents secure, with the
tools we already have. I'm a pretty good software program user, I know a lot
of tricks, but I am a novice at VBA and macros. I have only used it a couple
of times and I had to have detailed step, by step instructions.

Any help on setting up the code for this and any other suggestions on ways
we can protect our documents from modifications will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Sorry to pop your hopeful bubble, but it just isn't possible to do this reliably
in Word. While you can write macros that intercept the built-in commands
(http://www.word.mvps.org/FAQs/MacrosVBA/InterceptSavePrint.htm) and either do
nothing at all or pop up a warning message, it is _not_ possible to force anyone
to allow macros to run in Word. All the recipient needs is to set the macro
security level to High or Very High (which many organizations do as a matter of
course, for their own security), and your macros are completely and irrevocably
blocked.

Probably the most reliable way to prepare your contracts for emailing is to
convert them to PDF, using all the security measures available in Adobe Acrobat.
Under no circumstances should you be sending Word documents, which cannot be
made secure.

Even with "protected" PDF documents, it would be possible for a truly dedicated
miscreant to scan or otherwise recreate a duplicate contract and rewrite parts
of it at will. The best you can do is to prevent casual changes and make it
harder for determined modifiers.

For some purposes, there's a lot to be said in favor of paper!