Re: electronic signature in Microsoft Word

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Jay Freedman;1175347 Wrote:
It's relatively easy.

- First, you need a digital certificate. For real security, you need
one
issued by a Root Certificate Authority or a certificate server that can
be
traced back to a root authority. Unless your company has such a server,
this
is going to cost real money, about $200 per year.

However, you can create an "untrusted" certificate by running the
program
SelfCert.exe, which you'll find in the same folder with the
WinWord.exe
program (the location depends on what version of Office you have).
This
isn't a legally traceable certificate, but it may suffice for your
purposes.
You'll need to do this once a year as each certificate expires.

- The document must already have been saved at least once, so there's
a
named file on disk.

- Go to Tools > Options > Security and click the Digital Signatures
button.

- In the Digital Signature dialog, click the Add button. Select the
certificate to use. Click the OK buttons in all dialogs. Then save the
document again.

The document name in the title bar will say "Signed" or, if you used a
SelfCert, "Signed, unverified". There's also an icon of a red ribbon in
the
status bar with a tooltip that says "This document has been digitally
signed." Double-clicking the icon opens the Digital Signature dialog
again.

If you or anyone else alters the document in any way in Word and then
save
it, the signature will be removed. You can re-sign it with the same
certificate if you want.

The behavior if the document is altered outside of Word is a little
less
obvious. The title bar is unchanged. If you double-click the status bar
icon
now, it displays the message "This document has been digitally signed
but
has been modified since it was signed. The digital signatures in this
document will be removed if you click OK in the Digital Signature
dialog."
Then it opens the dialog with an empty certificate list.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the
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is there a way to enforce the entry of a password at the time of the
signature selection. adobe allows this. can this be done for office
documents?

thanks
knightl


--
knightl
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