How to Restrict Style Changes in Microsoft Word

This tutorial shows how to restrict style changes in Microsoft Word. We’ll walk through the steps for restricting specific changes and all changes. In Word, styles include (but are not limited to) fonts, font sizes and colors, italics, bold font, underlining, line spacing, and margin widths.

This video was filmed in Word 2016. However, the steps are the same in Word 2019 and Word for Office 365 and are similar in Word 2013 and Word 2010.

Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
1:03 Turn On Style Restrictions
1:35 Select Styles to Restrict
4:03 Turn Off Style Restrictions

📝 Corresponding Blog Post
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💻 Related Resources
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How to Restrict Editing in Microsoft Word (Video)

How to Insert & Modify Watermarks in Microsoft Word (Video)

If you have a specific question about Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat, please leave your question in the comment section below. Although I can’t guarantee that I will be able to accommodate all requests, I will certainly make an effort to create as many viewer-requested videos as possible.

Thank you for watching!

All Rights Reserved © 2025 Erin Wright

[ElfengourAbdelhakGIS]

Very helpful tutorial, thanks for sharing.

[ellef_lf]

Hi Erin - thank you so much for this. I have been using restrict editing setting to lock corporate headers and footers as well as text within a document and allowing only selected fields for users to fill in. But have had issues with users changing the page layout which causes issues with formatting and pagination of the final document.

I know the usual advice given is to set the document as a pdf to prevent changes. That is not really an option these days as there are programmes out there that can convert pdf to MsWord at a click and I do not wish to make it easy for others to plagiarize my work. So, grateful thanks indeed for this very helpful and useful tip which locks the document to allow only changes where permitted and most importantly other users are unable to just copy and paste or save as a new document to take away the restrictions. Tq.

[PierreDHautporte]

A useful tutorial. However, I thought it would explain how to get around Word preventing me from changing styles.
My doc is not protected and the "Restrict Permission" is set to Unrestricted Access.
I use various styles in the document. Several blocks of text have "K Poem " style set and won't let me change to "K Ordinary" style - both "Poem " and "K Ordinary" styles are defined for this doc. Any ideas, please?

[MM-uwlc]

I want to prevent my styles from being changed, but at the same time want my coworkers to be able to apply my styles without editing them. I just want to restrict styles from being changed not the whole document. Could this be possible? Thank you, Erin. A hug from Puerto Rico.

[viggob]

Thank you very much for this. I think most corporations with more people using word, would like to use a common design of their word documents, so they get the same professional look. Most students or self learned people of word would not automatically understand that, because they are used to change everything as they please. So I should like some video explaining the corporation view about this, and how it can be good for corporations to work with word and get a common design for their employees.

[waheedsaifi]

Hi, how can I set up a formatting and style for different part of the word document (for example heading, bold times new roman 28, body text calibry 10, footnote calibry 8, table justied calibry 8 etc) in away when you paste sentences with different font, size, etc, it automatically changes to the default style set for that part of the document and one doesn't have to change it manually?

[abhishekvaze]

I have a MS word document template, in which, I am filling data via C# code. This document has tables in orange color. On generating the actual document by running the code, the table color is changing to Green. I tried steps in the video, it did not work. Could you provide more help ?

[karanrandhawa]

I need help! Can someone please help me ?
When I share my assignments with my teacher then the whole presentation becomes a mess such as the columns of pages break and shapes move on another pages from original position but remain same in my pc . It only happens after sharing word documents. I'm using word 2019. If anyone knows the solution please help me .

[carolebaum]

How do I prevent from automatic capitals at the start of each line when I am writing poetry?

[Thurold]

How do you do that on Mac? I can't find these options in the Review tab either.

[maymolofy]

How to restrict table formatting so the columns remain the same width when text or images are added & do not mess up the formatting