How to Lock a PowerPoint Presentation

Last updated on November 17th, 2023

If you need to share a PowerPoint presentation online but don’t want that the people who get it be able to edit or modify the content then there are many different ways to lock PowerPoint presentation or PPT files. In recent versions of PowerPoint you can configure the general options at the time you save a file as a given name and specify a file encryption setting to open the document or to modify the document.

For example, let’s say that we want to protect our business PPT PowerPoint template for sharing then we will do the following in PowerPoint.

How to Lock a PowerPoint Presentation - How to password protect a PowerPoint presentation

How To Lock and Password Protect a PowerPoint Presentation

Go to File -> Save As and then look for the Tools button aside of Save button. Click here and then General Options from the popup menu.

Now, a new General Options dialog will appear with encryption settings.

Encrypt a PowerPoint presentation with a Password
Encrypt a PowerPoint presentation with a Password

Here you can specify a password to lock the PowerPoint presentation for editing mode or just to open the PowerPoint .PPT. This way you can lock a PowerPoint presentation. Notice there are two options in this dialog box:

  • File encryption settings for this document and specify a password to open the presentation.
  • File sharing settings for this document, and specify a password to modify the presentation.

There are other ways to lock presentations or prevent users from editing them quickly. An excellent way to prevent a presentation from being edited is to save the presentation as a PDF. The people who get the presentation file can open the PDF in Adobe PDF or other PDF tools to print handouts like NitroPDF but not edit them. Alternatively, you may choose to save the PowerPoint as a PPS slideshow. However, this is not a secure way to lock or protect your files since users may be able to rename the PPS to ppt and edit it as usual.

You can use the approach described to lock PowerPoint PPT from editing and, for example, to prevent the removal of copyright notices in PowerPoint presentations. Additionally, you can use the lock PowerPoint approach to prevent the content from being overtly plagiarized in the short term. You can lock or password-protect a PowerPoint presentation using this method.

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