You may want to encrypt a Word document because you want to keep the contents of the document away from others. How Does Encryption Apply to Word Documents? Your Word for Mac documents can be password protected and encrypted for sharing easily. You will never need to know all of these details about the various encryption methods when you want to know how to encrypt Word documents on Mac. You don’t want to know how it is accomplished, you just want to be able to do it easily. From reading it, you can obviously tell it is pretty complicated stuff the average (or even above-average) user will want no part of, right? You just want to keep your documents from prying eyes. Now, only geeks really care about this stuff. With Microsoft 365 (and Office), your data is encrypted at rest and in transit via many different powerful encryption protocols and technologies, including Transport Layer Security/Secure Sockets Layer (TLS/SSL), Internet Protocol Security (IPSec), and the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). Triple Data Encryption Standard (TripleDES).The public key is used to encrypt the data and the private key helps decrypt it. Asymmetric encryption uses two separate keys.

The key needs to be shared with all authorized people.Īsymmetric Encryption : This can be known as public key cryptography too. Symmetric Encryption : Symmetric encryption uses a single key to encrypt as well as decrypt data. While we are talking specifically about Mac, the process will be similar for encrypting Word on a PC. The focus here is how to encrypt Word documents on Mac. We’ll take a deeper dive into how to encrypt as we go through this post, but in simple terms, think of it as coding a document in such a way that only someone (or a machine) with the code can translate it.Įncryption is used to protect documents from prying eyes or prevent people from accessing whatever the encryptor wants to protect. Encryption is basically encoding a message or information so only authorized people can access it.Įncryption doesn’t necessarily stop interference but it does prevent retrieval of the content in such a way that the person accessing it cannot use it. What does encryption Word documents mean? Why would you want to encrypt a document?Įncryption as it implies to a document is basically the same thing when applied to a device or anything else.

Password protect a word document in mac