Can I restrict printing on my document?

Once you give someone access to your document, you have effectively lost ALL control over what the recipient can do with it.

Thanks Albanis. But your solution (mark as final) only restricts editing, and I want to restrict printing.  In the past, people printed off our instruction manual and referred to it, but then they made errors because their printed version was out of date. We put the whole thing into a website, but because of limitations on our website platform, we decided to go back to a document, and planned to do a PDF. However that will not allow us to have collapsible/expandable sections, like Word allows. 

Under Protect Document, there is an option to Restrict Accessand there you can give permission to specific people (via email addresses) the permission to just read (not edit, print, or copy) content. That would work, except I want any user to have that kind of restricted access, not just people I have designated via an email address. 

Any other thoughts? I realize it's unusual to want to have an unprintable document.

Hi Amy,

I have had the same concerns as you before and I found out that there is no actual foolproof way that you can restrict printing to a specific word document. What you can read, you can print. Still, there are some ways you can do to prevent people from printing the manual.

If File -> Protect Document -> Restrict Permission is not what you wanted, you can at least, enable macros and copy-paste a code in Visual Basic Editor to prevent the printing (found it on a non-Microsoft website). I have also found similar problems as you, and their answers would be purchasing a program that restricts access to Copy, Edit, and Print while at the same time can be viewed by everyone. Watermarking "Instruction manuals are outdated" can also do the trick.

However, you can restrict printing but can be viewed by everyone if you upload a PDF file into the website. But since you wanted a collapsible/expandable sections in the document, I suggest that before uploading the PDF, you should keep the unconverted DOCX. That way, when you are to create changes, you may refer to that DOCX and then convert again to PDF and replace the uploaded file.

PS. As per my knowledge, PDF files can be printing-restricted using Adobe Acrobat. This is not a Microsoft product. Tutorial on how to enable PDF printing restriction is on this link: https://www.dummies.com/software/adobe/acrobat/.... This is a non-Microsoft Website but dummies.com is checked to be a credible source of information. Be aware of the pop-up ads that will link you to dangerous websites.

I hope this works for you and your company Amy. Let me know if you have any questions.

Best Regards,

Zion

Hi Amy , my name is Albanis

There are options that can help you in File> Information> Protect document (restrict access - Mark as final)

• https://support.office.com/en-us/article/help-p...

Regards