Word 365 unable to turn on auto save because document is password protected?

Question

I just upgraded to Office 365 and when using word, I can not turn on auto save for a document that I need password protected. I get a message that says to turn off encryption for the document to enable auto save. How do I turn off encryption? I understand that documents sent to the cloud are encrypted but why won't it send a password protected document to the cloud? I can save it locally, but I would like to take advantage of auto save and have the document stored in the cloud so I can access it from my other computers when needed. Please advise. THANKS!

Answer 1

Hello!

To turn off encryption for a Word document in Office 365, you can follow these steps:

1. Open the Word document that you want to turn off encryption for.
2. Go to the "File" tab and click on "Info" in the left menu.
3. Under "Protection," click on "Encrypt with Password."
4. In the "Encrypt Document" dialog box, delete the password and click "OK."
5. This will turn off encryption for the document and allow you to enable auto save.

Alternatively, if you want to keep the document encrypted but still use auto save, you can try saving the document to OneDrive or SharePoint instead of your local computer. This will allow you to access the document from other computers and take advantage of auto save, while still keeping the document encrypted in the cloud.

Good luck!

Answer 2

Hi @Leonard Belanger

Sorry, encrypt documents is a feature that not supported by AutoSave at current time.
If possible, please remove password encryption from the document as alenezi's suggestions.

Thanks for your understandings.

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Answer 3

To: Alenezi, Emilyhua, Thanks for the quick response. I was able to turn off encryption, but auto save still would not turn on. Between your step 4 and 5, I had to hit the refresh/save button next to the auto save button, then auto save turned on. In terms of your suggestion to keep the document encrypted and still be able to share it by saving it to OneDrive, this does not work if the document is password protected. What is somewhat confusing in terms of this problem is that although encryption satisfies a security concern about storing documents in the cloud/OneDrive, it does not prevent users from accessing my document once it is retrieved from OneDrive or from my local hard drive. Only password protection can solve this problem and allow only authorized users from accessing this document. I understand that this feature/level of protection is not yet available/supported in Word 365, but I hope your team/Microsoft developers are aware of the problem and working on a fix, because this is extremely important. I will have to continue to password protect my sensitive documents and saving it to my hard drive and then manually propagating it to my other computers for access. Hopefully this issue/problem will be resolved soon in a future Word software update.
Thanks for the help.