How to Allow Editing of a Restricted Word Document

There are a few reasons you might want to allow editing of a restricted Word document. For example, you may need to give someone the ability to make changes to a document without giving them full access to the document.

Or, you may need to allow multiple people to edit a document, but you only want certain people to be able to make changes to certain parts of the document.

Restricting editing in Word is fairly easy to do. To restrict editing to certain parts of a document, you can use the “Restrict Editing” feature. To restrict editing to specific people, you can use the “Protect Document” feature. However. if you need to allow editing of a restricted Word document, there are a few different ways you can do it. Let’s look at how to allow editing of a restricted Word document.

In this blog post, we’ll look at why you might want to allow editing of a restricted Word document and how to do it.

How to Make Changes in a Restricted Word Document

Here, you switch on the protection but also mark areas of the document which your collaborator can change.

1. Go to the Ribbon > Review > Protect group > Restrict Editing.
2. Under Editing restrictions, select the checkbox for Allow only this type of editing in the document.
3. Select No changes (Read only) from the dropdown.
4. Now, you want to protect the document but also allow some parts of it to be editable by your team. Select the part of the document where you want to allow changes. You can select several sections of the document at the same time. First, select the part you want, hold down the CTRL, and select more parts.
5. The Exceptions setting helps you to choose between anyone who opens the document or specific users to edit the part that you selected. So, select the checkbox for Everyone or click on More users and type in the usernames or email IDs of specific team members.
6. Go to Start enforcement and click the button for Yes, Start Enforcing Protection.
7. The Start Enforcing Protection dialogue box is displayed with an option to set a password. Users who know the password can remove it and work on the entire document. If not, they can edit only the selected parts that are open to them.
   

This becomes a restricted document. When someone receives the Word file, they can make changes to a specific part of the document if they have permission to do so. The Restrict Editing task pane has navigation buttons for moving to the regions of the document that they have permission to change.