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If you share your PowerPoint presentations with other people, you may want to protect or lock your content so that the slides may only be viewed, and not edited. Or perhaps you want to provide editing control only with a password. PowerPoint 2010 provides an Encrypt with Password option to protect your presentation. However let us ponder about why anyone would need to password protect their PowerPoint presentations? There are many reasons, and here are two of them:

1. A presentation with confidential content that may be edited (or not) is safe if it is password protected -- nobody without access to the password can open it (or edit it).
2. The password protected presentation is more safer to share -- you can provide the password to the person whom you are sharing the presentation with.

There are two ways to add password protection to your presentation in PowerPoint 2010 -- and the second way has more options -- first let me show you the easy way:

1. Open an existing presentation. If you want to retain the original presentation as unprotected for yourself, it is a good idea to choose the Save As command and work on a copy of the file.
   
   
2. Access the File menu, and choose the Info option to open Backstage view with the Info panel (see Figure 1).
   
   
   Figure 1: Info Panel
   
   
3. In the Permissions area, click the Protect Presentation button to bring up the menu you see in Figure 2. Choose the Encrypt with Password option.
   
   
   Figure 2: Encrypt with Password
   
   
4. This brings up the Encrypt Document dialog box that you can see in Figure 3. Type a password in the field, and click OK.
   
   
   Figure 3: Encrypt Document dialog box
   
   
5. This opens a Confirm Password dialog box (see Figure 4). Retype the same password that you typed in step 4 and click OK.
   
   
   Figure 4: Confirm Password dialog box
   
   
6. Within the Info panel shown in Figure 5, you'll see that the Permissions area mentions that a password is required to open this presentation (the yellow box) indicating that presentation is now password protected. Click the File tab again to go back to the default PowerPoint interface.
   
   
   
   Figure 5: Password applied to presentation
   
   
7. Save your presentation.

An alternative way to add password protection allows you to enable passwords not only for opening the presentation but also for editing -- if you enable an editing password, users will still be able to view your slides without making any edits to them. Follow these steps:

1. Access the File menu, and choose Save As (refer to Figure 2 above).
   
   
2. This opens the Save As dialog box, as shown in Figure 6. Select Tools, General Options.
   
   
   Figure 6: General Options
   
   
3. This brings up General Options dialog box that you can see in Figure 7.
   
   
   Figure 7: General Options
   
   There are two password choices:
   
   
   1. Password to Open: Type a password in the field, and the next time you or anybody else opens the file, PowerPoint will prompt to enter the password.
   2. Password to Modify: Type a password in the field to make the presentation readable and visible, but not editable.
      
4. After typing passwords in one or both fields, click OK. This opens the Confirm Password window as shown in Figure 4 above. Reenter the password. If you opted for both open and modify passwords in the preceding steps, you'll get the confirmation password window twice. Enter the passwords and click OK to get back to Save As dialog box.
   
   
5. Save your password protected presentation.

Opening Password Protected Presentations

Opening password protected presentations has its own share of procedures you need to follow:

• If you opted for a Password to Open, you'll see the password window as shown in Figure 8 when you open the presentation. 
  
  
  Figure 8: Password to open
  
  
• If you have applied a Password to Modify, you'll get a password window shown in Figure 9 where you have to only enter the modify password if you need to edit the presentation. Alternatively you can click the Read Only button and view the presentation.
  
  
  Figure 9: Password to modify
  

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