Lock docs and throw away the key...and related VBA

[kiln]

Couple of questions about locking word docs.

The main question is: how can I protect a word doc, and make sure it can
never be edited again?

I have written VBA code that sets the doc (word 2000) to "comments
only" which is the most protectd of the settings offered (word 2003
seems to have an additional protection setting, ReadOnly or something of
that sort). The VBA code to protect the doc is run when the user clicks
a custom commandbar button, which is fine, but the VBA and the embedded
"protect" password remain visible if the user opens the module. Thus one
solution would seem to be to get rid of the VBA modules, which luckily
are expendable at that point. Doable? Any other/better approaches?

Thanks

 

[Jezebel]

What are you actually trying to achieve? There's no way to make a
bullet-proof, locked-in-concrete document. Apart from the relatively easy
matter of hacking the document, users can always OCR the screen image, or
just retype the thing from scratch.

 

[Jay Freedman]

As we tell people in these newsgroups at least once a week, NO, there
is no way to protect Word documents absolutely. Certainly there is no
way to do so through VBA, because the macro security mechanism can
disable your macros without a second thought.

Word is first and foremost an *editor*, a tool for changing documents.
Beyond that, even if you locked down every facility Word has for
editing, saving, printing, etc., there's always the Windows
PrintScreen key followed by OCR. If anyone can see your document,
there's a way to copy it, and from there it's a small step to produce
an altered version.

You might want to look into Microsoft's Information Rights Management
stuff, or producing protected PDF documents.

 

[kiln]

Hi, thanks to both of you for responding...I did look here for clues
first, in fact got my tips about protect routines from here. Oddly,
google found very little for me to chew on... "lock doc" returns all of
six threads. I tried others too, anyways...

It's not a concern re someone copying the doc, it's a concern about
preventing changes to the doc after a final edit.

I'm not sure it has to be bulletproof, just less than silly, like my
current attempt (setting protect, and leaving the vba code with pswd
intact).

If I have to move them to pdf I'll do that. However the users of these
docs don't like pdf because they are so slow to load. I've read
somewhere that the reason pdf's are slow loading is that adobe loads a
ton of addins with the default setup, but I've not tried tweaking that
yet.

 

[Jezebel]

PDFs are certainly a simple solution for the situation you describe. Puzzled
by your concern about speed. The full version of Acrobat is a little slower
than Word to load, but not much. And the reader is quicker. What add-ins?

 

[Ikke123]

I think he's talking about the full Acrobat version indeed.
Kiln, if there are "slow" machines in your network, why not use Acrobat
Reader Version 5.0? Version 6.0 is a bit heavier, so why not stick to
version 5.0? It works fine for me on my "slow"machine. And creating a pdf
file from MSWord can be done with a free pdf creator tool like CutePdf or a
simular free program.

Good Luck,
Emmy

 

[kiln]

Hi - I've not checked out the add-ins yet, I gathered the notion about
them from a mag or net article about why Adobe reader was so slow
loading.

Looks like it's time to do the pdf thing. I'll need to gen the pdf via
code; the only option I've looked at so far is Amyuni...any others that
you've worked with and like?

Thanks for your input. It always makes me laugh when I see people write
"usenet is dead"!

 

[kiln]

Actually what they have on this site is simple the acrobat reader. I'm
not sure what version it is, but it's slow enough to annoy them. However
The priority has to be with the ability to lock the documents, so looks
like pdf is the way forward. I have to gen the pdf's via code, does
CutePDF offer that? Open to any suggestions you have, Amyuni is the one
I've looked at so far.