I have an application built in MS Excel using VBA. I originally protected some worksheets and the VBA project by password. My users can only input and use drop downs on specific cells in specific sheets. To let my VBA modify the protected sheets I had to unprotect the sheets and then reprotect them using the password.
The requirement of the project has now changed and now requires me not to have a hard coded string for the password in the code to protect and unprotect the sheets.
A code sample of what is going on in my VBA code is the following.
Worksheets("Loading").Unprotect ("****")
[Functional Code]
Worksheets("Loading").Protect ("****")
Considering that I have to have the password to gain access to the VBA project is there a way to allow the project to interact with protected sheets as if they were not protected?
If no. Is there another method of preventing user interaction with a sheet while not inhibiting VBA interaction ( Very hidden would not work for the user still needs to see the sheet ).
Side note: This needs to prevent a normal person with minimal technical skills from altering the sheets in ways that they shouldn't
On an unprotected worksheet use,
Worksheets("Loading").Protect Password:=****, UserInterfaceOnly:=True
See Worksheet.Protect method for full details. Once it has been set with this extra parameter and the workbook has been saved, the protection will be bypassed by any VBA code but remain in place for user interaction.
Related
I'm building a worksheet on microsoft excel and it will deal with sensible business data. The worksheet will be placed on a USB drive and have to move from place to place constantly. Therefore I've created a feature in excel VBA to enable/disable password protection. Here is how it works.
A page named settings is xlVeryHidden containing the user's password in a cell, another cell in the page contains the word yes or no. Depending on weather password protection is activated or not. When the user first opens the Workbook all sheets are xlVeryHidden except one containing a button to continue, they click on the button which runs a macro to check weather in the settings sheet the word is yes or no. Depending on so, they are prompted with a login or all the sheets are unhidden.
The code for the login is the following:
If PasswordTextbox.Text = ThisWorkbook.Sheets("Settings").Range("J5").Value Then
And after that all sheets are unhidden. Else it will give an error Msg Box.
Also the VBA code editor will be protected with excels default system.
What I'm asking here: Is my system fairly secure? For a regular computer user would this be hard to crack?
Thanks in advance :)
I'll add that it is pretty easy to unprotect your macro to get access to your code. If possible, you should think about implementing a protected database to store your sensitive data and populate your excel file from there, after proper authentication from the user.
I'm working on Excel and would like to know if there is a way, within a script, to protect a sheet entirely but leave a certain range totally unprotected (the range here is ("B2", "C32")
In Format, unlock the cells you want to allow updating (they are all locked by default), then activate sheet protection, with or without password. For VBA learning, use the recorder.
I have a workbook that contains several (lookup) tabs that I don't want any users to be able to unhide. However, there is one tab that contains admin info that I would like admin users to be able to see. I have a button and macro that prompts for an admin password before unhiding this tab, but if I protect the workbook structure (so that hidden tabs are not accessible for other users) the vba fails. Is there no way to protect/unprotect the workbook from within the admin macro? I have tried various combinations of ActiveWorkbook.Unprotect, ActiveWorkbook.Protect and ActiveWorkbook.ProtectStructure to no avail - both within the admin macro and WorkbookOpen. The error msg I most commonly encounter is "Can't assign to read-only property" even after having ActiveWorkbook.Unprotect at the top of my code. Does anyone know how to work around this? I don't really want to have to leave all tabs open to being unhidden with a second password on the Admin worksheet itself - clumsy!
Instead of protecting the whole workbook, set the Visible property of the sheets you want to hide to xlSheetVeryHidden - you can do this manually in the properties window of the VBA editor. Now those sheets won't show up in the Unhide… dialog. Your macro could swap the visibility of your admin-only sheet from xlSheetVeryHidden to xlSheetVisible and back.
By itself this doesn't protect your workbook from a user who knows how to access the VBA editor and properties, but if you need to do that there seem to be a lot of answers to a quick web search - it may depend on your version of Excel.
Thanks for taking a look at this question, I can't seem to find a solution that fits my needs.
I have a spreadsheet that has many individual sheets (sheet1,sheet2,sheet3...sheetx).
Sheet1 must always be visible.
Sheets 3,4,5....x must be hidden and protected such that they cannot be unhidden without unprotecting the workbook.
Sheet 2 must be normally hidden and protected as above but with the option of editing it after entering a password. The process of hiding and unhiding this sheet must not allow the user to see or unhide sheets 3,4,5....x
i.e the user must be able to hide,unhide and edit sheet 2 by use of a password but without ever allowing the user to see sheets 3,4,5,x etc.
Thanks again for having a look at this.
Charlie
You can try hiding sheet 2 (right click --> hide) and then password protecting the workbook.
But before that go to VBA and paste and run this:
Sub HideSheets
Worksheets("sheet3namehere").Visible =xlVeryHidden
Worksheets("sheet4namehere").Visible =xlVeryHidden
Worksheets("sheet5namehere").Visible =xlVeryHidden
End Sub
Doing this will remove the Unhide option for the above sheets from the user interface.
To unhide the sheets you will have to repeat the above but change xlVeryHidden to True.
Lastly you can password protect your vba project: Tools --> VBA Project Properties--> Protection. You can use a different password from the one that you have used for the workbook.
This way the needed sheets can be hidden without the Unhide option from the menu. While sheet2 can be still unhidden in the normal way if the user has the password to unprotect the workbook.
I have an excel tool that gathers information from a user based on their login information. The information is stored in cells on one of the worksheets. If I wanted to lock these cells so they can't be updated manually, how can I go about doing that? If someone else logs in, obviously these cells would change. I hope to do it through VBA.
I only want to lock 6 cells... everything else should be editable...
Thanks
You can protect the worksheet with a password like this:
Private Sub Workbook_Open()
Sheets("sheetName").Protect Password:="YourPassword", UserInterfaceOnly:=True
End Sub
That will prevent users from manually making changes to the worksheet without entering the password. Your VBA code will still be able to make changes because you've set UserInterfaceOnly to True.
Note that users could easily view this password by navigating to the code through the Visual Basic editor. You can password protect the code as well, though: just right-click on the module, click on VBAProject Properties and go to the Protection tab.
See this page for more information: Excel VBA: Macro Code To Run Macros On Protected Worksheets & Sheets.
If these cells are the only ones on the sheet you want to protect, then just change the cell properties of the remaining cells by changing Locked property to false and leave the cells in question as Locked then protect the sheet using UserInterfaceOnly set to true (but realize that this doesn't work for all possible macro changes, so I usually avoid it.)
There are other methods that could work, but I think this is the best solution for you. If not, please add a comment to let me know.