From everything you have reported, I cannot see any good reason to have the document protected, if users can change it at will. The 'skeleton' document appears to be a template. Save it as a template and get users to create new documents from it. Then the macro and password would be superfluous.
As I mentioned earlier, you cannot make changes to a document and then retain those changes when you close it without saving it.
Clearing the data and saving it is problematical for a document that allows free editing. You would have to store the original content somewhere that the user has access to and replace the edited version with the stored original. None of this is necessary if you use a template.

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Graham Mayor - MS MVP (Word) (2002-2019)
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