Make Office Better

Make parts of documents ‘read-only’

Sometimes you’ll want to restrict what people can edit in documents you send them, such as questionnaires. Libreoffice Writer lets you do this using its Sections tool.

Open the document you want to edit in Writer, then use your mouse to select the first block of text you want to prevent people from changing. With the text still selected, open the Insert menu, then select ‘Section…’.

If you’re going to add a lot of read-only sections, it’s worth naming them, so change the name from Section1 to something more descriptive. Now, in the Write Protection section, tick the Protect box (see screenshot). If you want to stop people turning this setting off, tick the ‘With password’ box, then click ‘Password…’ to set the password. Click Insert to create the new section.

Select the next block of text you want to set as read-only, then repeat this process. Continue doing this until you’ve marked all your read-only sections. Depending on your Writer settings, you may see faint lines around each section. If you want to remove these, open the View menu and click Text Boundaries.

Now save your document. If you or anyone else opens the document in Writer and attempts to edit a read-only section, a warning box will appear. This warning won’t appear if the document is opened in Microsoft Word, but the text will still be protected.

If you want to temporarily allow changes for one or more of your sections, open the Format menu, then click ‘Sections…’. Select the section you want to change, then remove the tick from the Protect box. Alternatively, you can permanently remove sections by selecting them, then clicking Remove (if you set a password when creating the section, you’ll need to enter it at this point).

Don’t worry about losing text when you remove a section – although the section is deleted, the text will remain.