Fortunately, you can protect the header and unprotect the body, when necessary, but the process isn’t intuitive. You can protect a document, but there’s no setting that lets you protect only the header and footer while continuing to allow users to edit the body of the document. Once everything’s in place, you can protect the header so no one can inadvertently mess it up especially if you’re collaborating with others in your organization. Headers are an important part of many Microsoft Word documents. For more info, visit our Terms of Use page. This may influence how and where their products appear on our site, but vendors cannot pay to influence the content of our reviews. We may be compensated by vendors who appear on this page through methods such as affiliate links or sponsored partnerships. Once your header and footer are complete, you might want to protect that area so others can’t change it while leaving the body of the document available for edits. How to protect only the header and footer areas in a Microsoft Word document
