MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
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Hello again,
Quick excel password question if I may.
I'm making a spreadsheet for someone for a small fee. Can I set a timed password on it? What I want to do is send it to them, let them play around with it for a day or two and make sure they like it, then the password kicks in and locks it and then when they pay I give them the password and off they go. Also, if I can do this how do I stop them copying it during the test, or make sure the password gets onto the copy too?
Thanks
Can't give a thorough answer because I'm on a data limited WiFi network at the moment.
I don't think you can do password protect after a certain amount of time within Excel but I wonder if there might be a way to use a counter for number of times the spreadsheet is opened.
It would be very clumsy, but I reckon some kind of VBA code could count up every time it's opened and then after xxx uses it either locks the sheet, or deletes the contents and saves itself as a blank sheet or some such thing. Downside is that you would need the user to allow macros, so you may need to lock the sheet and have a macro that unlocks it just to force the user to allow macros.
As far as preventing them copying the sheet, maybe selecting all cells, setting cell properties to hidden and then protect the sheet with select and modify locked cells allowed?
Unless excel has improved recently then it’s not too hard to crack a password anyway. I’m not aware of a way to do what you want although something like the FlyingOx’s approach could probably also be used to password it, although nothing would stop you copying the data.
Rule1 : don’t do work for people you don’t trust.
Rule2 : put your name and (c) statements all over the file, including in the meta data, print headers etc and you’ll have a good chance of leaving enough of a trace to resolve a dispute.
if they have had to sub it out they presumably aren’t too excel literate you could probably do some very crude stuff with an if(today()>x,...) somewhere that either screws up the formulas or displays a great big “This version is unlicenced” banner. Hide some of that in a hidden sheet and you’d confuse most people into just paying.
Downside is that you would need the user to allow macros, so you may need to lock the sheet and have a macro that unlocks it just to force the user to allow macros.
Very hide all sheets the user needs having only one visible that tells them they have to enable macros to make it work. Very hidden sheets can't be unhidden from the front end.
You could use the system date to effectively lock things up. Cracking the VBA password would be beyond most people, unless they have the ability to use Google 😁😁
Set conditional formatting so all the cells show white text on a white background once it's passed the date threshold. Not difficult to remove (even if you lock the sheets) but a simple vba free way of doing it.
Thanks all. I think poly has the answer. Most of the calcs are on one hidden sheet, the rest of the sheets are for data entry each month and displaying annual totals and suchlike.
So I'll make everything on that sheet =if(now>10 days away, original formula, otherwise zero) and password the sheet. Change the date to 100years from now when its done and it will work long passed its expected usefulness.
Nice and easy to do, no macros or VBA. The person I'm doing it for isn't very excel literate so that will be plenty.
And I've no particular reason not to trust them, just never done this before and it seemed a sensible precaution.
Thanks all.
You could also upload it to Google sheets and share it with them with read only permissions.
Would take about 1 minute start to finish.