A few days ago a client had a password protected Word form for which the password had been forgotten. They were not able to edit the form or even copy the text in it due to Word’s protection feature. What to do?
I turned the form into a pdf. At this point we had a couple of choices: 1) Use Acrobat’s fabulous form features and make it a pdf form, or 2) turn the pdf back into a Word document. The client chose to keep the form in Word, so I exported the pdf to Word. The form fields were no longer valid at this point, though, so they had to be re-entered. However, all of the text of the form was now available for edit.
We then held a workshop on how to create forms in Word, add form fill-in fields, checkboxes and option buttons and then protect the form with and without a password.
