About the only way I could see you meeting the requirement is to have your
application remotely get the data from a centralized (non-resident) database
that has sufficient sophistication to achieve the security level desired.
Or to compile the information in an executible which excel can load into
memory and retrieve the data from. In either case, the data probably would
be stored in an encrypted state and decrypted by your program.

Your proposed security scheme is so weak it probably wouldn't be worth the
effort to implement.

If you are really serious about this project of yours, you might consider
hiring an individual or firm with a proven track record for the skills you
need to put it together for you and make a product that is secure and
marketable.

--
Regards,
Tom Ogilvy


"Mark Stephens" wrote in message
...
Thanks for that,

What I am actually intending is to supply data to a commercial application
but I am not allowed by the source of the info to supply the raw data so
waht I need to do is to 'load' the data into the application. One way I
thought of getting round it is to allow the user to download the csv file
to
his hard drive but somehow make it inaccessible and then use some
programming I learnt ages ago to pull data from a file (it was an excel
hopefully it will work for a csv) without opening the file. Anyone know if
this is possible?

Kind regards, Mark


"DM Unseen" wrote in message
ups.com...
mark,

there was an Excel 97 SDK, that has some info in webqueries. After that
AFAIK MS when silent on this function. I would not depend on this
function, it his flakey and tricky to use. A webquery is in fact an
HTML table.Webquery parameters are in Fact HTML POST or Get parameters.
Try some testing and see if it works for you.
Are you shure you want to go from an excel file to a web page and back
to an excel file?

If you are just providing internally maybe think of a database. I would
suggest linking to the excel sheet using Get external Data. If it is
for the internet, just upload your file as a csv file for download is
also possible.

DM Unseen