In article ,
"David R. Norton MVP" wrote:

And how many computer shop employees know how to remove passwords from
Office documents?

Every one I've ever encountered.

You've asked at every computer shop? Or have you just not encountered
many? That differs significantly from my experience. The shops I work
with have nobody who's trained to do so. None of them knew that removing
a VBA password takes about 30 seconds with a hex editor (1 second if you
script it).

How many are willing to make house calls? How many are willing to take
on the liability for damages, including bonding? How many do more than
cursory background checks on their employees? How many even have an
interest in providing that service?

How many computer shop employees know how to tell whether person A has
legal standing to open any particular file?

It's not difficult, going into a company site and having a person in
authority is reasonable indication

Hmmm...what authority is necessary? How do I know someone is "in
authority"? If you're talking liability to the computer shop for an
improperly unprotected file, a prudent computer shop owner would need a
heck of a lot of assurance, at a similarly inflated price.

going into a private home and seeing a PC
simply requires asking.

Now that's just laughable. So the person (not in authority) at the
company site takes the file home, and can have it unprotected just for
the asking?

You're trying to portray Office protection schemes as somehow more than
they are - more than Microsoft claims them to be. Protection is not
absolute - XL's worksheet and workbook protection are useful to keep
honest users from accidently overwriting formulas, that's *it*!!!! File
protection can keep casual snoopers out of the file, but even that
doesn't encrypt it - with a hex editor and a reasonable guess as to the
data layout and tokenization, you can reconstruct a workbook without
unprotecting it. It's a lot more work, of course...