Microsoft Office 2007 completely rearranged the toolbars and menus into a combined ribbon bar.  While this has been touted to increase usability and discoverable, features not included in the ribbon bar might be difficult to access.

Password-protecting a Word document is one of those such features.  Being in a technical role, I was perplexed when I was unable to perform a task as simple as password-protecting a document.  I’m sharing this post for those who may find themselves in the same situation.

I started out wishing to protect the following document:

I switched to the review tab thinking it would be easy

This was a dead-end, however, because this was not the simple password-protection I was used to from Office 2003.  This had to do with Digital Rights Management.

I ended up find the feature hidden away in the Save As dialog:

Inside the Save As dialog, then hidden in the bottom left hand corner of THAT dialog:

General Options looks like this, and we are finally able to set a password.

Hopefully this post will be easier to find on Google that the current search results.