If you modified the code and want troubleshooting help, attach the modified workbook. Graham can troublesheet the issue based on his code. It looks like the line with If .Tag = 0 in the main routine might be your issue. With your modified code that replaced his combobox with a textbox, you likely don't need a line like that.

For the pdf modifications, you probably need to use a 3rd party application to flatten and or password protect the file. Several have GUI's to make that easy. Some have command line options that can do it. e.g. pdftk
Of course with the command line switch features that some have, we can automate that in VBA using Shell().