Now the document is published and needs no longer to keep secret -if it was password protected – how to remove password from Word document so that everybody can open it and modify? This is what we are talking about in this post.

We’d learned how you can set password to Word document in my previous post. I wonder, how could I forget about unlocking the document? Here goes the reverse process.

Microsoft Word 2003

Step 1. Open the document

Needless to say, you need the password to open document because it was protected with password. Enter password and open it. If you lost the password, but you need to unlock your document, you need to install special software. We’ll discuss the process in coming posts.

Step 2. Open Options dialog box

Click on Tools menu and then on Options to open the dialog box. Alternately, you can open ‘Save As’ dialog box and click on ‘Tools’ button to choose ‘Security Options’ menu. (Please refer previous post for ‘How to open Options dialog box)

Step 3. Delete the passwords from boxes

Now, based on which password you need to remove, you can delete the password text (******) from the respective boxes. To allow document open to everybody remove password text from ‘Password to Remove’ box and if you wish to allow everybody to edit document remove password from ‘Password to Modify’ box.

Step 4. Click OK

Click OK to close the Options dialog box. Don’t forget to save the document otherwise this change will not be saved i.e. your passwords are not removed.

Remove Passwords from Word 2007 Document

Removing password from Word 2007 is similar to Word 2003 in that, you need to delete the password text from ‘Password to open’ and ‘Password to modify’ boxes. The difference lies only how you will access the dialog box. Because password security has been managed under General Options in Save As dialog box in Word 2007 you need to access the dialog box by:

Choose ‘Save As’ from Office button. On Save As dialog box open the menu by clicking ‘Tools’ button. Choose ‘General Options’. On the resulting dialog box you can find the boxes where passwords were entered. Just delete them and click OK and save the file. Done!

Please refer to my earlier post how you can set password to Word document if you still don’t know how you can access General Options dialog box.

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