Secrurely Hiding Columns and other areas

[craigwojo]

Hi everyone,

I am looking for a secure way of hiding columns in the spreadsheet from being opened. I have heard that Microsofts Excel is pretty easily cracked to view the columns if needed. I know that anything is able to be cracked if needed. But is there a 3rd party that has something to make it more secure and/or harder to access the hiden material?

Thank you,
Craig

 

[Joe Was]

Their are high and low tech things you can do to trip up someone who is doing work-arounds on your security.

Low tech, change the column fonts to the color of the cell backgrounds then hide. Add a Selection Event that make it impossible to select cells in that column [Password protect]. Put data that will be hidden way off to the right of the sheet [most people dont look that far.].

High tech, do all the calculations by VBA code so no formula references are shown in cell that tip the user off that data is in hidden columns. Put that data in hidden columns on their own hidden sheets. Use code to gray out the menue options that would un-hide or deal with security. Then you only need to deal with the password security weaknesses. I have and others have posted code to do these things before.