Protecting Word document branding

Thanks to Susan Harkins at TechRepublic (2022), I found out how to protect the branding in my Word headers and footers. As we all know, consistent branding and a good layout makes our Word documents more legible (plus looking more professional). While many organisations have templates for particular documents, the headers and footers which usually contain the branding are often unprotected, so we can inadvertently muck things up.

To prevent that, organisations are able to protect documents, but that doesn't necessarily extend to the header and footer. However, there is a process for doing just that: but it isn’t intuitive (NB: this fix doesn't work on the web version of Word as files "with enabled protection in any section" simply won't open).

OK: so we are in MS Word, our is document all ready to go with our desired branded headers and footers, and the process is as follows (Harkins, 2022):

1. Toggle the Pilcrow - or paragraph mark - icon in Word (that's the icon that looks like this: ¶. Read more here). Doing this will make it easier to see what we are doing to our document
2. Key Ctrl & Home to go to the very beginning of the document
3. At the very beginning point we insert a page break so we can make header/footer changes: Layout | Page Setup | Breaks menu | select "Continuous"
4. Next we protect the document. File | Info (left pane) | Protect Document | select "Restrict Editing" 
5. Word takes us back to our document showing the Restrict Editing options (right pane). Under "Editing Restrictions", tick the option box, and select the default "No Changes (Read Only)". This means we have "protected the entire document: If [we] stopped right now, no one would be able to edit anything. That’s not what we want. We need to unprotect the body of the document" (Harkins, 2022).
6. So to unprotect the body of the Word document we select everything EXCEPT the section header. We key Ctrl & Home to put our cursor at the beginning of the first line. Then we key Ctrl, Shift & End to highlight everything onwards from that section break we inserted in step 3
7. Word will ask us for a password, so we should put in a simple password for now (e.g. "Word" or "pass"). Enter it twice and click OK. Later we will create something more secure
8. Look for the opening and closing brackets at the beginning and ending, respectively, of the unprotected area (which we can see because we turned on the Pilcrow)
9. Close the document, and reopen. Try to edit the header/footer area to check our password works. Seek feedback, make changes, then - once the document is approved for circulation - change the password to something more secure . Ensure the password is logged appropriately!
10. We can now edit the headers/footers by entering the password and making the changes we need. And without the password, the header/footers cannot be changed. Only body of the document can be edited.

As Susan Harkins notes, the "solution isn’t intuitive, and, oddly, Word doesn’t offer an option for protecting only the header and footer" (2022). But thank you to Mrs Harkins once more, for a work-around that helps us do our work :-)

Sam

References:

Harkins, S. (2022, September). How to Protect Header and Footer Areas in Microsoft Word. TechRepublic. https://www.techrepublic.com/article/protect-header-footer-word/