Locked lesson.
About this lesson
We will look at how to protect a presentation from editing or limit who can access a presentation by setting read-only access, encrypting with a password and marking as final.
Exercise files
Download the ‘before’ and ‘after’ PowerPoint presentations from the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.
08-02-protecting-a-presentation Exercise.docx54.9 KB 08-02-protecting-a-presentation Exercise Solution.docx
285.7 KB
Quick reference
Protecting a Presentation
When sharing our presentation with others, we may want to add protection to prevent accidental changes. We have 4 protection options to choose from: Read Only, Encrypt with Password, Add Digital Signature and Mark as Final.
When to use
We would protect a presentation whenever we are sharing it with others if we want to prevent accidental changes.
Instructions
Compress Media
Our presentation currently contains many pictures, icons and videos. These types of media increase the overall file size of the presentation. If a file gets too large we might experience poor performance. It's worth optimizing the presentation and compressing the media. In general, the higher the quality the larger the file size.
- From the File tab, on the Info page.
- Click Compress Media.
- Select HD (720p).
Protection
Open in Read-Only Mode
Read-Only mode is one way of prevental accidental changes. A yellow bar will appear at the top and people have to specifically opt in to editing.
- From the File tab, click Info.
- Click Protect Presentation.
- Select Always Open Read-Only mode.
- Close down the presentation.
- Re-open the presentation.
- Click Enable Editing to edit the presentation.
Encrypt with Password
Setting a password on a file ensures that only those people with the password can access and edit the presentation.
- Click Protect Presentation.
- Select Encrypt with Password.
- Type in a password and click OK.
- Confirm the password and click OK.
- Close down the presentation.
- Re-open the presentation.
- Type in the password to access the file.
Add Digital Signature
Digital signatures allow us to add an invisible or visible digital signature to a presentation. To use this feature, we need to sign up to a digital signature service such as GlobalSign and purchase a digital signature.
Mark As Final
Mark As Final lets others know this is the final version of the presentation and further edits are discouraged. When a presentation is marked as final, the word Final will show in the status bar and the document property 'Status' will be set to final.
- Click Protect Presentation.
- Select Mark as Final.
- Click OK.
- Read the warning message and click OK.
- Close down the presentation.
- Re-open the presentation.
- Notice the yellow warning message at the top.
- Click Edit Anyway to edit the presentation.
Hints & tips
- To remove protection, simply go back to the Info tab and select the protection thats been applied. To remove a password, delete it from the password box.
- If you encrypt with a password, you must remember the password. If you forget, there is no way to retrieve the password and Microsoft Support will not be able to help.
- 00:04 One of the major hazards when it comes to sharing your presentation with other
- 00:08 people is that there is always the chance that someone could accidentally change
- 00:13 your presentation.
- 00:15 If you imagine this scenario you've spent hours or
- 00:18 even days creating this beautiful PowerPoint presentation.
- 00:22 You send it to your colleague in another office.
- 00:25 And before you know it, they've accidentally changed something and
- 00:28 they can't really remember what they've done.
- 00:31 It's then going to take you extra time to put that presentation back to how it
- 00:35 was originally.
- 00:37 So having a way to safeguard your presentations
- 00:40 from accidental mistakes is extremely important.
- 00:43 Unfortunately, in PowerPoint as with all of the other Microsoft applications,
- 00:48 there are numerous different ways that you can protect your presentation.
- 00:52 So let's take a look at some of the options that we have.
- 00:55 Now when it comes to protection,
- 00:56 you're going to find all of your options in that backstage area.
- 00:59 So we need to go back to File.
- 01:01 And once again, we're jumping down to the Info page.
- 01:05 Now before we get to protecting our presentation, there is something else in
- 01:08 here that I just like to highlight because it's extremely important.
- 01:13 The presentation that we've created whilst it's not extremely long does have quite
- 01:17 a few slides in there.
- 01:19 And it is a very graphic's heavy presentation.
- 01:22 I've used lots of images, I have a video in there, icons,
- 01:25 all different kinds of things like that.
- 01:28 And images and videos take up a lot of space.
- 01:31 So this file size currently is 134 meg, which is pretty large.
- 01:37 Now when presentations start to get this size,
- 01:39 you can start to experience poor performance.
- 01:43 So what I will always recommend you do is that when you have completed your
- 01:47 presentation, jump into here and go to this compress media option.
- 01:52 And from here, you can choose the quality of your presentation.
- 01:55 So Full HD is the top one.
- 01:58 It will save you a little bit of space by compressing it to this, but
- 02:02 not as much as these other two options.
- 02:05 So I always find a happy medium is to compress to 720p.
- 02:09 So I'm going to do that first of all before protecting this presentation.
- 02:13 You can see that it runs through a compression process.
- 02:19 And you can see that after compression, I've now saved myself 43.7 meg.
- 02:25 Let's click on Close.
- 02:27 So now that we've done that, let's take a look at protecting.
- 02:31 The button below is going to show us our protection options.
- 02:34 And I'm going to run through three of these with you.
- 02:37 So the first one here is to always open this presentation in read-only mode.
- 02:42 Now read-only mode is basically there to prevent accidental changes.
- 02:46 It doesn't lock the presentation down.
- 02:48 It doesn't lock people out of it.
- 02:50 They don't need to type in any kind of password, what they will see when they
- 02:54 open the file is a yellow bar across the top that says read-only.
- 02:58 And in order to make any changes to that presentation,
- 03:01 they basically need to opt in by clicking in the yellow bar.
- 03:04 So it's a way of avoiding accidental leaning on the keyboard or
- 03:08 anything along those lines.
- 03:11 So let's apply read-only.
- 03:13 And I'm going to close down this file and then reopen it.
- 03:16 And there you go.
- 03:17 You can see that yellow bar running across the top it says read-only.
- 03:21 To prevent accidental changes, the author has set this file to open as read-only.
- 03:26 So in order to make any changes,
- 03:28 my colleague has to click the Edit Anyway buttons.
- 03:31 So they're making a conscious choice to edit this presentation.
- 03:35 So that is your first option.
- 03:37 Let's go back to File and go down to Info.
- 03:40 And I'm just going to remove that read-only access.
- 03:44 The second option you have is to encrypt your file with a password.
- 03:48 Whoever you send this to also needs the password in order to edit that file.
- 03:53 So let's select this option.
- 03:55 And let's type in a password.
- 03:59 It will ask you to confirm.
- 04:02 And there we go.
- 04:03 Let's close it down.
- 04:05 And you'll see straightaway it's asking me to provide that password.
- 04:08 Once I've typed that successfully, it's going to let me into that presentation.
- 04:15 And I can start to make edits.
- 04:18 So that is option number two.
- 04:20 Back into File, down to Info.
- 04:23 The third option here is to add a digital signature.
- 04:26 Now I'm not going to cover this option because it's quite advanced.
- 04:29 And is probably the one you're least likely to use.
- 04:32 You can essentially add an invisible signature to your file.
- 04:36 And to do this, you need to sign up to a digital signature service.
- 04:40 And in some cases, pay a fee for the luxury.
- 04:44 So we're going to leave this option for now.
- 04:45 And move straight on to the mark as final option.
- 04:49 So this basically lets readers know that this is the final version of this
- 04:53 presentation.
- 04:54 And no more changes are to be made.
- 04:56 So let's click this, and then say, OK.
- 04:59 So at this point, PowerPoint is going to pop up a little warning message,
- 05:03 which is going to tell you exactly what this mark as final option does.
- 05:07 So it says,
- 05:08 this document has been marked as final to indicate that editing is complete.
- 05:12 And that this is the final version of the document.
- 05:15 When a document is marked as final, the status property is set to final.
- 05:20 And typing editing commands, and proofing marks are turned off.
- 05:24 You can recognize the document is marked as final when the mark as final icon
- 05:28 displays in the status bar.
- 05:31 So let's click on OK.
- 05:33 So as soon as I've done that, you can see what happens to my presentation.
- 05:37 I get this yellow warning row across the top just letting me know
- 05:40 that this is marked as final.
- 05:42 Of course, I could just click the Edit Anyway button, but
- 05:45 I have to make a conscious decision to do that.
- 05:48 You'll also know that in the status bar,
- 05:50 I have a new icon which tells me that this is marked as final.
- 05:54 And if we go to File and down into Info, and view all of the properties for
- 05:59 this document, you can see that the status has also been changed to final.
- 06:05 Now I'm actually going to go back into here, and
- 06:08 I'm going to remove mark as final.
- 06:10 And I'm also going to remove the password from this file as well.
- 06:14 So all I need to do here is delete all that password and click on OK.
- 06:19 So those are the three options that you have when it comes to protecting this
- 06:23 presentation prior to sharing it with others.
- 06:26 And that's exactly what we're working towards doing.
- 06:29 In the next section, we're going to take a look at exporting, printing,
- 06:32 and of course, sharing.
- 06:34 So I'm going to head across there now.
- 06:36 And I look forward to you joining me.
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