5 Tips to Protect Your Privacy or Business Information on PC

A computer used in company or other public places can hardly avoid being touched by people other than you. Even in family, your friends or relatives might use your PC occasionally. Therefore, you may need some security measures to protect your privacy or business information from being peeked or even tampered by others.

For this purpose, I collected some tips to make your computer more of a personal field.

Add Sign-in Password

To protect your computer, the first step is doubtlessly adding a password to your account. Take Windows 10 as an example. You can:

1. Hit Start button at the bottom-left corner of your screen.

2. Click the Setting button which looks like a gear.

3. Choose Accounts in Windows Settings.

4. Switch to Sign-in options.

5. Choose Password and hit Add button, you can then create a new password or
   change the existing password as you like.

Protect Office Files with Password

There are many useful Microsoft Office tips can help you protect privacy information in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. One of the most commonly used methods is adding password to these files. And the processes are almost the same.

1. Open the file you want to add password, click File at the top-left corner.

2. Find Protect Document in Info tab. Click it to expand the menu and then you can
   select Encrypt with Password.

3. Input the password you like and re-enter it to make confirmation. Next time
   whoever opens the file will be required to enter the right password in advance.

Hide Specific Text or Data

If you don’t mind others viewing your Word or Excel files except for some specific contents that containing privacy information, you can actually hide the specific text or data only.

1. In Word, you can select the specific text and right click it to choose Font from the menu. Then check Hidden option in Effects section under Font tab. Thus the selected text will be hidden immediately.

1. As for Excel, you just need to select the column or row you want to hide. Then right click the selected area and choose Hide in the menu.

Clear the Recent Opened File List

You can also delete the recent documents history in Microsoft Office apps like Word, Excel or PowerPoint. Thus others won’t know what documents you’ve viewed recently.

Alternately, you can directly remove the start screen within several clicks to protect your privacy and also boost the startup speed of Office apps. The steps are as below:

1. Hit File – Options.
2. Find Start up options in General tab of Excel Options.
3. Check Show the Start screen when this application starts.
4. Click OK to implement it.

Hide Specific Files

Sometimes you don’t want others to find your private files or folders at all, then you can try hiding them instead of adding passwords.

1. Find the file or folder that you want to hide on your computer. Click it and switch to View tab.

2. Hit Hide selected items button in Show/hide section.

3. Then the selected item will be hidden. If you want to show it again, just check Hidden items option, select the file and hit Hide selected items again.

You may not be able to prevent others from touching your computer, but with these tips, you can protect your important information effectively.