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Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Flash Drives

Since projectors & SmartBoards have made their appearance at our school, more and more teachers use PowerPoint during their classes.  I am a huge fan of PowerPoint in my classes, but unfortunately, they take up a great deal of space-I use our school network to save all of my files, and back it up on an external drive at home.  But, I know other teachers that don't trust the network and they carry a large numbers of USB Flash drives around with them.  I started thinking about what happens if you lose your USB-how can you secure your files?

It turns out that Microsoft Office (which accounts for about 99% of the files on my main Flash Drive) has a built-in password protection option (no downloads necessary).  There are downloadable files that will let you do similar things to any files.  I'm on the hunt for one that will password-protect my entire Flash drive, I'll update the blog when I find a good, free one.

To password-protect your Office Files (2007):
(click the images to enlarge them)

1.  Click the Office Button at the top & click Save As...



















2.  In the lower left portion of the Save As... dialog box that pops up, click on General Options.













3.  Enter your password in the fields, you can make the same or different passwords for opening the document and for modifying the document (it will prompt you to verify them).




















4.  When you (or someone else) tries to open the file, it will ask for the password, just enter it to open the file.










5.  If you can't remember it (or someone is trying to access your data), you will see this...



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