Protect the database with a password

- [Instructor] It's common for an Access database to include sensitive information that should only be accessible to people with the proper credentials. By establishing a password on your database file, you can keep your data secure. In order to password protect your database, we're gonna go up to the File tab, and in the info section, we're gonna click on the encrypt with password button. That'll bring up this information window that says, "You must have the database open for exclusive use to set or remove the database password." To do this, we need to close our database and reopen it in a specific way. Go ahead and say okay to this, and then we'll come up to File, and I'll come down to close.

That'll shut down our database but leave Access running. Then, I'll go back up to File, click on Open, and then click on the Browse button. That'll open up my file browser where I can go out to my desktop and find the Exercise files. We're in the Chapter Eight folder, and it was the Landon Hotel password file that I'm working with. To make sure you only click on this file once, if you double-click on it, it'll automatically open up again. With it selected, though, I'll come down to the Open button and press the downward-pointing arrow to the right of the Open button. That'll give me some additional options, and one of those is to open exclusive.

Go and select that option, and now we should be able to go to the file menu and in the info section, press encrypt with password. This time, it'll give that message. When opened exclusively, Access opens our database but it doesn't allow anyone else to open at the same time. It doesn't say we need to be in it in order to set a new password. Now that we've successfully gotten this window we can type in a new password and verify it. Go ahead and press the OK button and we'll get this message saying, "Encrypting with a block cipher is incompatible with row level locking." And that's okay.

Go ahead and press the OK button and now your database will be protected by a password. Let's go ahead and close it down and try opening it again. This time before anything loads we need to enter in the database password to get access to the files. Once you've successfully entered in your password your let in and everything is as it was before. If you choose to remove the password, we can go through the same process again. Just need to go back to the file tab and close. Then file, open, we'll click Browse again, will go back out to our Exercise files, and we'll choose that file.

Once again, I'll use the right portion of the Open button and open exclusively. It's gonna ask me for the password to open the database. Once it's open we can go back to File and in the info section we now have a decrypt database button. When you click on it you need to enter in your password one more time, and now the password has been removed from this database. Let's go ahead and close it down and open it up one more time. This time we're not prompted for a password before opening up our files, so setting a database password is a simple step that you can take to protect the information and contents of your database.

Just make sure that you use a password that you can remember or write it down in a secure location. Otherwise, you could find yourself locked out of your own database.