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We are currently battling with getting rid of old DOC, XLS, PPS, PPT files on our file shares. So far we used the Office File Converter to convert them to the new file formats which worked quite well. Now, after a few days of converting a few thousand files we realized that OFC didn´t convert the write protected files of Word properly but only some non-readable content which is not related to the original files.

We are therefore looking for a way to track down these write protected Word files.

Write protection refers to the password dialogue that you see when you open the file in MS Word which gives you the option of opening the file write-protected. When opening a file with that write-protection you also have the option of saving/converting it into the DOCX format and it will preserve the write protection i.e. the password dialogue comes up again when opening the DOCX file.

Does anyone have an idea how that can be done?

Julius Mensing
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    What "write protection" are you exactly referring to? – Massimo Aug 15 '19 at 11:13
  • I don't think there's a native way to do it, but there are third party utilities that claim to be able to find them. - https://www.google.com/search?q=find+password+protected+word+documents&rlz=1C1OKWM_enUS859US859&oq=find+password+protected+word+documents&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.14491j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 – joeqwerty Aug 15 '19 at 11:39
  • Thank you for your help joeqwerty, one of the tools worked fine – Julius Mensing Aug 16 '19 at 10:06

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You can find all the .doc files (for example) having the ReadOnly flag with this Powershell command:

Get-ChildItem -Path c:\temp\*.doc -Recurse | select Name,IsReadOnly | where {$_.IsReadOnly -eq $true}
Swisstone
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