I need to be able to lock worksheets against being edited (well, and allow
sections to be editable). This would be a trivial task, but I need to be
able to do it by manipulating the XML representation of an Excel document
(working against Excel 2003, for the record).

I can't simply use Excel to do this, save it to XML, and then see what's
changed, because Excel strips out protection information when you do that.

I've spent a great deal of time looking at the schemas, fiddling with a
SpreadsheetML file and seeing what elements and attributes pop up when... but
no luck.

I've figured out how to Protect the Workbook and how to Protect a Worksheet,
and I can find attributes that allow/disallow pretty much anything you'd like
to be able to restrict on cells... except for content editing.

I simply cannot find where I:

1) Tell Excel to prevent the editing of cells.

2) Tell Excel to allow the editing of specific cells while the rest of the
sheet is locked.

Does anyone know how to do this? I'm at loss.

Thanks!

Richard

Why don't you get an image of the Excel Worksheet and distribute that
instead?

The requirements of what I'm working on. This isn't about distributing an
..xls file, it's about generating an .xls file for distribution.

This sort of thing can be done programmatically through OfficeInterop but,
as most of the work is being done to the XML version, it'd be silly to go
through the extra step of doing this one thing that way unless it's
absolutely the only option.

when " wrote:

Why don't you get an image of the Excel Worksheet and distribute that
instead?

Do you know how to add VBA macros to the XL VBA representation?