Sending secure Word docs with Confidencial

ℹ️ Let’s say you are Alice, an employee at an organization that is using Confidencial, and you want to send a protected Word document to your coworker, Bob, who is not using Confidencial. This tutorial walks you through how to do that.

⚠️ This tutorial assumes you already have a Confidencial account and have installed the Confidencial Office add-ins.

1. In Word, open or create the Word document that you want to protect

2. Open the Confidencial task pane and log in if you haven’t done so already

   
3. Add the recipients for whom you want to protect the document by clicking in the recipient adder and entering in an email address. In this example, we are encrypting for [e-mail].

   
4. Since Bob is not an existing user, click Send Invite to… to invite him to Confidencial

5. Now that Bob has been invited, select his email to add him as a recipient of the document

   
6. You (Alice) and Bob now appear in the recipients list

   

   ℹ️ The recipients list determines who can view protected content. You are automatically added as a recipient of any message or file you encrypt, so you will always be able to decrypt any message or file you protect.

7. Click Encrypt Document

   
8. The document is now protected. Save the document in Word.

   

   💡 By default, Confidencial encrypts the entire document. If you want to encrypt only certain parts of the document, see Encrypting parts of a Word document. 💡 Pro tip: Even after you’ve protected a document by clicking Encrypt Document, you can add additional content to your document - this content will remain visible to anyone who has access to the document. The protected content that you encrypted in the previous step will still only be visible to the people you designate in the recipients list.

   
9. Use the messaging tool of your choice (Outlook, Teams, Slack, etc.) to send the document to your coworker, Bob. In this example, we will use Slack.

   

   ℹ️ Note that even though the document has been encrypted with Confidencial, it remains a valid .docx file (Example.docx) and can thus still be opened in Word - no special viewer is required

✅ Bob now has the Confidencial protected Word document.