Password protected workbook discussion....

[chuckles1066]

I recently had to deal with some data sent to my company in a password protected workbook.

The data was viewable but not modifiable (effectively read-only) - why, I don't know...........but we needed to manipulate the data and it took literally 20 seconds to save the workbook as a text file and then re-open it in Excel, set where I wanted the field breaks to be and voila.

Any comments on why there's such an easy workaround?

FWIW, this isn't a criticism of Excel, just a genuine observation

 

[Smitty]

Any comments on why there's such an easy workaround?

Because Excel's not a secure environment, not has it ever been marketed as one. Workbook & sheet protection really just keeps honest people honest and 99% of the time, that's good enough.

Smitty

 

[Legacy 51064]

If you can get into the VBA viewer, then the code is very easy to break. If you want to protect the workbook to keep most people from being able to get the information, you need to password protect the vba viewer.