MS Word and Excel password protection

[cpeterm]

Office 2010 and Windows 7 Professional.
Use passwords for confidential Word and Excel files but saw somewhere that MS password protection is not secure. You knowledgeable opinion please.
Thank you

 

[Golden]

In theory it's encrypted with AES128, but I have heard credible reports of them broken using a VBA script, amongst other methods.

I would zip the files using 7ZIP and the .7z format and use the AES256 password encryption option instead - that has never been broken (there is a still a bounty out on it, and so far it's unclaimed).

 

[cpeterm]

Thanks , appreciate your knowledge.