In this lesson, I will show you how you can control access to a document, and to begin with, I will go to Backstage view by selecting the File option.

In the previous chapter, I showed you how you can prepare a document, exclude from it everything that could be a problem for those users who have not yet switched to the latest version of Excel. That was the first step, but before you share your document with someone, it would be good to protect it, to prevent unauthorized access and changes. So I’m going to click on this button and show you all the options you can use to protect your document. Admittedly, they were also available in the previous version of Excel, but this is the first time that you can find them within the same menu. That’s why I won’t dwell on them, but I will try to show you briefly what you need for effective protection.

To begin, I will click on the Add a Digital Signature option to bring up a new frame on the screen. You probably already know that in order to create a digital signature, you must first log in to the appropriate service. After that, you will receive the appropriate data that you can attach to a document and thus confirm that you are indeed its author. Since this topic has already been covered in our Excel 2007 course, I will close this frame and move on to the next function.

One of the ways you can prevent unauthorized access to a document is to use the Restrict Permission by People function. If I click on it, three options will appear on the screen. The first indicates unrestricted access, while the other two will allow you to set the appropriate protection. To show you what it’s all about, I’m going to click on the Restrict Access option. In the frame that follows, there is a notice that in order to use this function, you must first log in to the so-called Information Rights Management service. This service is free and you can activate it by selecting the appropriate option at the bottom of the frame. Instead, I will click the Cancel button and OK to remove this warning.

In the end, I just want to mention that in order to use the Manage Credentials option, it is also necessary to log in to the already mentioned service. Unfortunately, this procedure is beyond the scope of our course, but in any case it is good to know that everything can be done directly from Excel.