Forum Discussion
Need help protecting formatted "hidden" cells in Excel Worksheets
Hello Community,
I have hit a brick wall and need your help, please.
How do you protect and excel workbook- and I mean in the following ways;
1-How do you prevent the person who you shared your workbook with, who can edit, from creating a copy of it or sharing it with someone else?
2-How do you prevent the same person from "breaking" your password protected workbook / formatted cells?
Open to all suggestions (though not familiar with Macors and VBA, I'm willing to learn). Do this options get translated between the Microsoft App and the Microsoft Web Service?
I've recently ran into the discovery that protected formatted cells that are "hidden" does not get translated well into Microsoft Web Service.
Thank you so much in advance!
Daniel Mendoza.
5 Replies
- The short answer: use encryption based security or Information Rights Management (IRM): https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/restrict-access-to-workbooks-with-information-rights-management-in-excel-3525d8fd-4313-4645-b60e-5ec0e1b9c317
Sheet level protection is stored in the XML of the workbook and can be removed very easily.- how do i obtain IRM?
Excel provides several options for protecting your workbooks and worksheets.
However, it is important to note that worksheet-level protection is not intended as a security feature. It simply prevents users from modifying locked cells within the worksheet .
1- To prevent someone from creating a copy of your workbook or sharing it with someone else, you can use file-level protection. This refers to the ability to lock down your Excel file by specifying a password so that users can’t open or modify it. You have two choices here: File encryption and Setting a password to open or modify a file . You can also use an online platform such as OneDrive where you can prevent from users actions.
2- To prevent someone from breaking your password-protected workbook/formatted cells, you should use a strong password that is difficult to guess or crack.
However, it is important to note that if you forget or lose your password, Microsoft cannot retrieve it for you.
Regarding your question about whether these options get translated between the Microsoft App and the Microsoft Web Service, i can't give an answer because my knowledge in this direction is limited. However, it is possible that some features may not be fully supported on the web version of Excel.
Link: Password options
Hope it helped you a bit!
NikolinoDE 1-the issue I run with when encrypting my workbook is that then the end user can no longer edit the worksheet unless they have the password. But if I provide them the password then they can now do whatever with the worksheet that i was preventing them from doing in the first place.
I guess to make my point more clear, how do people sell excel worksheets online and protect their worksheets from being copied and shared and used by other un authorized to do so?
2-Isn't there "unethical" ways to unprotect a password protected workbook by Macros or saving under .zip format regardless of the strength of the password? Even through 3rd-party services that break passwords...
- There are different ways to lock an Excel file or worksheet individually, depending on what you want to do.
Here are some possibilities:
Lock or unlock specific areas of a protected worksheet
Also want to make my point clearer on this matter:
There are several ways that people can sell Excel worksheets online while protecting them from being copied and shared without authorization. One way is to use a platform like WordPress with a plugin like Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) to sell digital products like spreadsheets. This gives you full control over your store and products, with powerful features and no middleman fees.You can use blog.sellfy.com too, here is a instruction from them how to sell Excel or Google spreadsheet templates.
Another way to protect your worksheets is by encrypting them with a password.
This can be done by heading to the File menu in Excel, clicking on the “Protect Workbook” button, and choosing “Encrypt with Password” from the dropdown menu.
Should I charge for that too?
- As well as there are people who protect files with passwords, there are also people with some “unethical” ways to bypass the protection of a password protected Excel workbook.
Most of these methods are also illegal. Therefore, I recommend that you "always" get permission from the workbook owner before attempting to remove any protection. One way is to change the file extension and manipulate the components of the file.
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