Hello,

I wanted to follow up on this. I had another engineer from MS call back and
there is a way to prevent the hidden cells or any cell for that matter from
being copied in excel. To do so you click on Tools, Protection, Protect Sheet

There is a list of check boxes in the Protect Sheet window under "Allow all
users of this worksheet to:"

Uncheck "Select locked cells" and "Select unlocked cells" and then ok. Then
users will not be able to select any cells in the worksheet to copy or paste.

I understand that the password technology is still lacking but for general
users that wouldn't look for a way to hack the sheet.

"kfrost" wrote:

Hello,

I have a customer who has sale people that have product spreadsheets for
pricing. They have wholesale and retail pricing on the same sheet. The
wholesale prices they hide and password protect, however, the problem is you
can open the spreadsheet in read only mode and then save a copy of it. Then
open the saved copy and the password protection is then removed.

I'm trying to find a way to prevent this. However in searching it appears
that the password is pretty much insecure any way. So my thoughts are using
MS office tools for VS and creating an Excel Project and hard coding the
password into the document for them.

First of all if anybody has a better suggestion on how to secure these
hidden cells where only sales person have access to them, I would love to
hear it. Secondly if building and compiling the app is the best way, does
anybody have a sample for VB.Net?

Thanks.

kris