Hi Forum

I am trying to find out if there is any way to lock a Word file with a password that only becomes active after a certain date. I produce work products in Word and sometimes customers are "late" paying invoices. This would be a way to give access only until a certain date. They pay the invoice and get the password.

Can anyone help?



Many thanks

John

Any user who becomes aware of your ruse can simply work around it by any one or more of:
1. Save the document in the docx format;
2. Copy/Paste the contents to another document;
3. Disable VBA;
4. Change the system date;
5. etc.

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Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Paul is right.
See also: No Copies - No Editing for general constraints.

If your work product requires macros to be used you could conceivably add something to essentially blank it after a certain date and furnish the product without this in it after the invoice is paid. To me, this would be simpler than password protection.

One way to 'force' 99% of users to enable macros is to save the file as a template and store the desired contents in a building block but leave a notice in the document that tells them they must enable macros to see the contents.

An automacro could then run to replace the notice with the building block if the date hasn't been exceeded.

This method isn't completely foolproof but it might make it harder for them to figure out work arounds. You would probably want to also block Copy/SaveAs/Print options to increase the protection.

As the others have indicated, there will always be workarounds that clever users can use to circumvent your protection methods.

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Thank you.