Protect a Presentation from Editing

• Aug 10, 2026

The DevExpress Presentation API protects PowerPoint presentations from editing with a password. A protected presentation opens in read-only mode. Users must enter the correct password to edit the presentation.

Protect a Presentation from Editing

Follow these steps to enable write protection:

1. Create a WriteProtectionOptions object and specify a password and hash algorithm.
2. Pass the WriteProtectionOptions object to the Presentation.protect() method.

The following code snippet applies password-based write protection:

package presentation;

import com.devexpress.docs.office.*;
import com.devexpress.docs.presentation.*;

import java.io.*;
import java.nio.file.*;

public class Main {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        try(Presentation presentation =
                    new Presentation(
                            Files.readAllBytes(
                                    Path.of("Presentation.pptx")))) {

            // Enable write protection.
            WriteProtectionOptions options =
                    new WriteProtectionOptions("password", HashAlgorithmType.SHA512);

            presentation.protect(options);

            Path outputDir = Path.of("output");
            Files.createDirectories(outputDir);

            // Save the protected presentation.
            try (FileOutputStream fileStream = new FileOutputStream(
                    outputDir.resolve("ProtectedPresentation.pptx").toFile())) {

                presentation.saveDocument(fileStream);
            }
        }
    }
}

Remove Write Protection

Call the Presentation.removeProtection() method to remove write protection from a presentation:

presentation.removeProtection();

Save the presentation after you remove protection.