Monday, July 22, 2019

How to Make Word Documents Fillable but Not Editable

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If contracts are part of your daily workflow, you know how frustrating it is when people change parts of the document or form they shouldn’t. Fortunately, Microsoft Word has a developer tool that lets you protect the text in your document while still allowing people to fill in blanks.

Making Your Document Fillable, Not Editable

Let’s say, for example, that you have a non-disclosure agreement that you want to send out to an employee that will be joining your company. You want to give the receiving individual the ability the fill in the blanks in the document, but you also want to ensure that none of the information in the NDA is altered or changed in any way. It only takes a few steps to achieve this in Word. Here’s how.

First, grab the legal document you want to work with. Microsoft provides a few basic templates, but there are also a lot of websites that provide detailed, comprehensive legal templates online for free, drawn up by actual attorneys. In this example, we’ll be using an NDA that we grabbed from the above link.

Once you have your document pulled up, it’s time to add some controls and protection to it. First, you need to get into the “Developer” tab. Word doesn’t display this on the ribbon by default, so let’s go ahead and fix that.

Click “File.”

File tab in Word

At the very bottom of the menu, select “Options.”

Options in Word

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