Excel Password Protection- Part 1

One of my readers, his name is Stew, requested me to discuss about Excel password protection because I mentioned it in my last post entitled Advantages And Disadvantages Of Microsoft Excel Database Application. As I said in that post, there are many ways to protect your Excel file. I can not tackle everything in one post, so consider this as the first part of series of articles about Excel password protection. I put off for a while my topic on how to develop Excel database application to give way to this one.

Password Protect Your Excel File From Unauthorized Use

This one is very simple to do. Open an Excel file. If you just created an unsaved new one, save it first before you can set a password into it. Then follow the steps below:

• Click File>Save As in the menu.
• On the Save As window, click the Tools at the upper right portion of it as shown in the screen shot below:
• The Save Options window will appear as shown in the figure below. The window prompts for 2 passwords. The password to open the file and another one to allow the user to modify the file. The second one is optional. If it is left blank, Excel assumes that the first password is for both opening and modification. If the second password is provided, it will ask for a second password when you open the file. If the second file is not entered on opening, the file is in read-only mode.
• There are two checkboxes, the "Always create backup" checkbox makes your Excel file to create a backup whenever you modified the file. The next one is "Read-only recommended" checkbox that prompts you if you want to open it as a read-only or not.
• The best part of this Excel password protection is that you can tighten your security even more by having a strong encryption method for your password. You can do that by clicking the "Advanced" button. You will see Encryption Type window and choose the encryption type that you want. It looks like this:
• Click the Save button.

Next time we will discuss about password protecting your worksheets and cells ranges.

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