How to remove protection from editing a Word document: four simple and effective ways

Sometimes.doc or.docx text files created with Microsoft Word cannot be edited or copied. The reason for this is the included protection against such operations, backed up by a password. This article will tell you how to remove this type of protection from a document in Word.

What are the ways?

To overcome the limitations when working with a document, 4 simple and free ways were invented:

Insert text into a new document as an object.
Removing a protection setting using the WinRAR archiver.
Remove the restriction by saving the document as HTML.
Convert to one of the related formats:.doc or.docx.

Each of these ways to understand how to remove the protection of a Word document from editing works in any version of the editor, starting from 2003.

Method number 1: inserting a protectedtext to another document

This method has one drawback: when pasted into a new document, only text and its formatting are added, while pictures, graphics and other multimedia elements are not.

The sequence of actions for this technique is as follows:

Create a new document - Ctrl + N.
Microsoft Word 2003 - go to the "Insert" menu and click on the "File" item. Specify the path to the protected document and click Paste.

how to unprotect a word document for editing

Microsoft Word 2007 - 2016 - switch to the "Insert" tab and in the "Text" block, click on the inverted triangle near the inscription "Object". In the menu that opens, click on the line "Text from file". Use the Explorer window that appears to open a file that is protected from editing

After this operation, the text will become editable.

Note. To use this technique in Microsoft Word 2003, the format of the protected file must be DOC (.doc).

Method 2: Edit file settings using an archiver

To use this method, you will need WinRAR or 7Zip archiver and display file extensions enabled. To make extensions visible:

Go to Control Panel.
Switch the view to Large/Small Icons in Windows Vista, 7, 8, 10. Nothing to do in Windows XP.
Find the "File and Folder Options" or "Folder Options" icon for XP and other versionsWindows respectively and double-click on it with the left mouse button.
In the new dialog box, switch to the second tab and find the line "Hide extensions for known file types", uncheck it.

After preparation, you can remove the protection from the file. This is done as follows:

Right-click on the desired document and select the "Rename" sub-item in the context menu or select it and press F2.
Move the cursor to the end of the name and delete the last 3 or 4 letters, and write zip instead. Press Enter.

Extract the resulting archive to any folder.
Among the unzipped files, find a document called settings.xml. It is located in the Word folder.
Right-click on it and select "Open with" and "Notepad" from the context menu.

In the Notepad window, press Ctrl + F and enter the Protection value (without quotes) in the text field.
After finding this inscription in the text, remove the following values: w:documentProtection and w:edit="readOnly".

remove protection from word document online

Save changes to the document by pressing the key combination Ctrl + S.
Open the archive, go to the Word folder and drag the edited file into it.
Start the backup procedure with the option to replace files with the same name.

Change the extension of the received file to the original one

After that, you can open the document and edit it.

Method 3: Removing protection with HTML

This technique is about the same complexity as the previous one, but it does not require any third-party software. The algorithm is as follows:

Open edit-protected document.
Press F12, select a location to save the new file and select "Web page (.html)" from the "File type" drop-down list.

To the context menu of the created document, sequentially select the items "Open with" and "Notepad".
In the new window, in the "Edit" menu, click on "Find" or use the hot key Ctrl + F.
In the window that appears, enter Protection in the search bar and click "Find Next".

Find the line in the document: ReadOnly and delete it.
Save changes.
Open the edited file with Microsoft Word and re-save it as.doc or.docx.

Note. When using this technique, text formatting is partially lost.

This completes the description of the third way to remove protection from a document for editing in Word.

Method 4: Convert to DOC or DOCX

To remove the ban on editing by this method, you need to:

Go to the site of the multifunctional online converter Online-convert.com and change the language toRussian using the drop-down list in the upper right corner of the page.
On the main page, in the "Document Converter" block, select "to DOC\DOCX format".

On the next web page, click on the "Select Files" button. In the opened window of the "Explorer", specify all the documents that need to be converted.
Click on the inscription "Start converting". Upon completion, automatic download of the archive with converted files will begin.

protection word document from editing how to remove

This is the way to understand how to remove protection from a document in Word in an online converter.

Note. Not every Internet service for converting one format to another is able to remove protection. One of them is zamzar.com. It converts successfully, but the new file cannot be changed.

Methods to remove protection from a Word document are quick and easy enough to be freely used by the average user of this editor.