Microsoft® Office Excel® 2007 Inside Out

Controlling Document Access with Information Rights Management

Information Rights Management (IRM) technology, introduced in Microsoft Office 2003, has been improved in the 2007 Microsoft Office system. IRM lets you, the creator of an Excel (or other Office) document, specify which users or groups of users are permitted to read, edit, print, or copy that document. As a means of preventing unauthorized access to or use of your work, it’s a more robust mechanism than traditional firewall methods because the access controls remain with your file, even if your file is removed to a different storage medium. It’s also both more convenient and more robust than file-level password protection. Rather than distributing passwords to authorized users, you ...