View Only excel?
View Only excel?
(OP)
Is there a way of protecting an excel (2010) spreadsheet so that it becomes view only to anybody else? A quick google search doesn't turn up anything. I have data to share, but it becomes stale very quickly and others in the organization have a tendency to print something out once and refer to it for the next 10 years. I want to publish it on SharePoint and force everybody back to the SharePoint source anytime they want to reference the data.





RE: View Only excel?
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Doug Jenkins
Interactive Design Services
http://newtonexcelbach.wordpress.com/
RE: View Only excel?
Personally I think the cause is hopeless, since a sufficiently determined user will just print screenshots. perhaps you could watermark the spreadsheet with "Latest data for this sheet is at www.idontknow.com. This data is current as of xyz"
Incidentally the concept of transient records in a serious information retention system gets around this, my personal paper copies of a spreadsheet would be destroyed after 3 years, maximum, more likely two years (I quite simply empty the 2014 drawer into the shredder).
Cheers
Greg Locock
New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?
RE: View Only excel?
But even then, pdf passwords are easily circumvented, and as you say, there is nothing to stop people doing a screenshot.
Doug Jenkins
Interactive Design Services
http://newtonexcelbach.wordpress.com/
RE: View Only excel?
I'd like to leave it as excel so that people can grab small bits of data for immediate use; that's what it's for but I don't want anybody using this month's data 3, 5, or 10 years from now. I'm working on an extract of the relay settings for our entire system so that other groups that may need to know what the settings are today can access them. But settings change, often, and I want (as does my management) everybody to go back to the well every time they want any setting information. Saving a copy is far too easy; making screen shots of a huge pile of data is, in my estimation, too much work.
If view only isn't possible, I'm probably looking at a .pdf solution with watermarks across the whole thing that the data is void after xx/xx/xxxx. But that's more work for me and somewhat less useful for others. I'd love to just trust people to go back for fresh data every time, but there's well established precedent that they won't. And since they won't, we'll get the "but you said..." complaints when reality doesn't match their year's old spreadsheet.
RE: View Only excel?
Skip,
Just traded in my OLD subtlety...
for a NUance!
RE: View Only excel?
RE: View Only excel?
How about a PDF with a watermark that includes the date, and dire warnings about the document going out of date?
--
JHG
RE: View Only excel?
I like Denial's suggestion.
You can also use vba to alter the visibility of a piece of word art which is used as a watermark. Use this in combination with some code for how current the data is.
Capturing a before print event can enable you to hide the data so only a blank page is printed. A before save event can be used to delete all of the data. Set print area to a blank cell, remove ribbon, remove ability to right click cells, etc... Basically cripple excel when in the spreadsheet.
Some form of punishment (naming and shaming) should follow for those who consistently circumvent the way the data should be used, as skip said management needs to support the correct way of using the data... If not you'll never get there.
RE: View Only excel?
The Before_Print event will Cancel any Excel print command.
The Before_Save event will cancel any Save/SaveAs command.
Opening workbook with your UID will bypass these event results.
This will not prevent someone doing a screen print.
I would further suggest that YOUR "official" print copy, that comes from you as paper or PDF, contain a header/footer that explicitly states, "Valid until date."
Of course all this needs VBA to "lock down" and require the user to Enable Macros or else they don't get a look, if the users will have access to the workbook.
If you want help doing this, you'll get better help at our sister site: http://www.tek-tips.com/threadminder.cfm?pid=707
You may want the users to grab data from this sheet for their use. Hmmmmmmm. Does it matter that when you publish the next version, they still have old data that they copied/pasted from the former version? One other possibility is to give users a user defined spreadsheet function that returns certain data based on some argument value(s). Not knowing the nature of your data it would be impossible to venture a guess at how that might be accomplished. Over a period of 20 years I've supplied a user community with dozens of functions that returned near current data from staged production data tables including part requirements, planned orders, production orders, inventory level, production order operation and much more.
Skip,
for a NUance!
RE: View Only excel?
RE: View Only excel?
Skip,
Just traded in my OLD subtlety...
for a NUance!
RE: View Only excel?