Hi Dennis,

I am a firm believer in leaving my Excel workbooks open to modification when it makes sense to do so. For the most part, I protect worksheets with no password, and let my users know this. The purpose is not to lock the file down at all, but rather to make sure that they don't do something nasty by accident. I do try to make sure that if they need to be able to change something, that they can. I also encourage my users to learn about Excel so that I'm not the only one in my organization to support the workbooks.

Unfortunately, however, there are times when protection is necessary, as honesty is just not a human trait that we can always rely on. In this case, the spreadsheet is a vital link between many of our point of sales systems and our general ledger. I know that sounds bad, but we have 4 legacy POS systems and a G/L which do not support any kind of interfacing technology except human hands! Excel can at least be used to create a journal entry in an acceptable format to import (manually) into our G/L. If I lose this spreadsheet, it will affect not only myself, but a few others in the organization. If we had the funds, this spreadsheet would not even be necessary, as we would have installed a fully integrated property management system, but unfortunately we're not there yet.

I do understand where you're coming from, but I, for one, do feel that protection abilities should be increased for this product. Excel has been pushed out to the business community for a long time, and is used the world over for purposes exactly like mine. I am also certain that many others also share my concerns.

I don't believe that anything out there is, or ever will be completely unhackable. I do think, however, that it should be a little more difficult than it currently is.

I am going to have to do some research on the COM add-in. That sounds very interesting to me...