Preventing Excel Product Piracy or Illegal Giveaways
 

I sell Excel-based software quite successfully. Delivery is as an *.xlt
template file. However, my educational customers like to pass it
around, for example, if I sell a copy to a student in Sao Paulo, I
could get a support question from a student in Buenos Aries a few
months later..., it happens everywhere, even the teachers do it, piracy
is rampant in edu-media. Can anyone help with suggestions on how I can
presonalize and prevent piracy and freebies and being ripped off - by
using VBA within the product, or by other means. Walkenbach and other
Excel software vendors do it. How can I? See us at SummitPK.com and
remember, when driving in the West, "Watch for falling rock!"


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fallingrock
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Good afternoon Fallingrock

Excel is not a secure development platform and has never been
advertised as such. Any form of password protection in Excel can be
bypassed in one way or another - and if students are passing your
templates between themselves they will pass on the password. A
knowledgeable user would be able to remove any kind of protection using
VBA literally within seconds.

Incidentally, John Walkenbach does not protect the add-ins he supplies
- his view being that attempts at protection can be bypassed and only
serve to hamper legitimate customers.

It seems to me that piracy is rampant on any digital media, be it
software (any type), music, films etc and as long as someone is sharp
enough to develop a method of protection, someone else will be sharp
enough to cripple it.

HTH

DominicB


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dominicb
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