General Application
Sometimes data recorded on Excel is of a highly sensitive nature. Yet many files are neither validated nor protected.
In your company today :
- The Board of Directors, the Financial Management Team or the Human Resources Team, just like any other department, use Excel spreadsheets as they do any other database or consolidation tool. The protection of these sheets is usually carried out using networking rights and/or by putting a password on the sheet.
- Passwords on Excel spreadsheets are not very effective (macros are readily available on internet which can break through any password). The problem is remembering as many passwords as you have Excel spreadsheets! And if you use the same password for all your files, this protection no longer complies to security standards!
- You may have already experienced one of your calculation spreadsheets, containing complex calculation formulae, being altered by a user inadvertently taking an action they were not supposed to do !
- Version management is also a problem: how can you be sure that all users are using the right version of an Excel file? Many save a file on their own workstation. If the source file is modified, their version will be out of date.
- For team work, you can protect certain cells and leave others accessible. The rules that you define are therefore general and no exception can be made for any particular user. Perhaps you would like to be able to give different access rights to different users…