Ausatco
21st Sep 2004, 00:59
I've written an Excel spreadsheet that contains a macro to sort a range of cells. Everything works as intended - so far so good.
I want to protect my intellectual property and I can do that by Protecting the worksheet. However you can't do the sort unless the worksheet is unprotected. That's easy IF YOU DON'T USE A PASSWORD. You can unprotect the sheet first thing in the macro, sort it, then re-protect it last thing.
Protection without a password is basically useless - all it does is inhibit inadvertent alteration of formulas. Anyone can defeat it from the menu with Tools|Protection|Unprotect - in fact that is what my current macro does prior to sorting, then restores protection in a similar way afterwards. Once Protection is off, of course, anyone can access the whole design of the spreadsheet and rip you off!
What I want to do is have a password-protected worksheet that allows sorting of a range without removing the protection first.
When you apply protection one of the check-boxes is Allow users of this worksheet to Sort. I've checked that, but it doesn't solve my problem - the macro won't run and the debugger reports that protected cells are the problem.
I'm missing something somewhere, can't find it in my searches of both Help and MS Knowledgebase, so if anyone has the answer I'd sure appreciate it.
Cheers
AA
I want to protect my intellectual property and I can do that by Protecting the worksheet. However you can't do the sort unless the worksheet is unprotected. That's easy IF YOU DON'T USE A PASSWORD. You can unprotect the sheet first thing in the macro, sort it, then re-protect it last thing.
Protection without a password is basically useless - all it does is inhibit inadvertent alteration of formulas. Anyone can defeat it from the menu with Tools|Protection|Unprotect - in fact that is what my current macro does prior to sorting, then restores protection in a similar way afterwards. Once Protection is off, of course, anyone can access the whole design of the spreadsheet and rip you off!
What I want to do is have a password-protected worksheet that allows sorting of a range without removing the protection first.
When you apply protection one of the check-boxes is Allow users of this worksheet to Sort. I've checked that, but it doesn't solve my problem - the macro won't run and the debugger reports that protected cells are the problem.
I'm missing something somewhere, can't find it in my searches of both Help and MS Knowledgebase, so if anyone has the answer I'd sure appreciate it.
Cheers
AA