safe protection of sheets and vba

  • Thread starter Thread starter Geo Siggy
  • Start date Start date
G

Geo Siggy

I'm looking for a safe protection of the content of my spreadsheets,
hiding all formulas, some calculation sheets and all vba programming
effectively. Is it enough to protect by choosing the cells (by Format/
Cells/ Protection on) and activate the protection (by Extra/
Protection/ Sheets resp. Workbook). I heard that they are ways to get
to the formulas anyway. For example by transferring it to another Excel
version. And how to protect the vba code efficiently. Maybe somebody
may give me a hint how to make sure that the Excel application can be
given away, without giving away the knowhow of the programming.
Thanx Siggy
 
Addition to my question: I dont mean cracking the given password, that
another topic. I mean getting to the formulas or vba source cod
through a backdoor are a transfer methode.
Does anybody have a clue ...
Thanx Sigg
 
Geo Siggy said:
I'm looking for a safe protection of the content of my spreadsheets,
hiding all formulas, some calculation sheets and all vba programming
effectively. Is it enough to protect by choosing the cells (by Format/
Cells/ Protection on) and activate the protection (by Extra/
Protection/ Sheets resp. Workbook). I heard that they are ways to get
to the formulas anyway. For example by transferring it to another Excel
version. And how to protect the vba code efficiently. Maybe somebody
may give me a hint how to make sure that the Excel application can be
given away, without giving away the knowhow of the programming.
Thanx Siggy
Click to expand...

The "protect sheet" password and VBA Project password in MS Excel
provides a reasonalble measure of security for everyday use.

However, if somebody is determined to find the password, there are
many options available - for example:

http://www.intertek.org.uk
 
Formulas can be gotten by removing the worksheet passwords, see

http://www.mcgimpsey.com/excel/removepwords.html

VBA source code can be accessed using commercial crackers or hex
editors. In fact, with hex editors, you can view the code in the file -
it's tokenized so that it's not easily human readable, but it's often
easy to get the gist of the code.

The most secure way to protect code is to develop compiled COM add-ins.
Unfortunately, they won't work with XL97 or any Mac version.
 
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