RE: Distributing Word docs to customers

["Jonathan West" <jwest -at- mvps -dot- org>]

> I feel you can distribute the documents in MS Word format.
> To prevent customers from copying content from the documents,
> protect the documents before you send them across to
> persons/entities outside the company. To protect a document,
> Click Tools > Protect Document...Share the password with the
> internal sales and support people. You can probably use a
> password that can be agreed upon by all the internal
> stakeholders, such as, XXXXXDDMM.

This is no protection. It can be got round extremely easily. All you need to
do is insert the protected document into a blank unprotected document, and
all the content becomes immediately available with no protection.

There are other reasons besides the ones aleady stated why documents should
not be distributed in Word format. One that springs immeditely to mind is
fonts. If you use any fonts in your documents that are not included in a
standard Windows/Office installation, then the fonts will probably not be
available on customers' machines. Font embedding works pretty well in PDF
documents, but much less so in Word documents where there is an expectation
that you can continue editing. In effect, you are abandoning control over
the document layout by distributing documents in Word format to customers.

Regards
Jonathan West

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