Excel file properties

[Madhu Gowda]

Hello Chandu Garu/Team,.Good Evening


My name is Madhu from Bangalore & I would like to seek your support in one aspect of Excel, so i'am writing.


Background: I work in a market research department of well known automotive company.

Considering this; we develop lot of data & project management tools using excel.


So when we develop the data/presentations & circulate the file, the file properties (Like:- Author Name, Prepared Date & Others) can be changed by anyone from their respective side and can be underutilized.


So I would like to seek your support to get to know the method to protect the properties, thus no one can change even after circulating with others.


For your kind information; we use MS-2010 (Excel).


So shall I expect for your support and inputs please.


Thanking you in advance.

Madhu

 

[imgonna]

Hi


Not sure - but I've done this before:


Alt-F11 to start the VBA editor.

Double click ThisWorkbook


paste this:


Private Sub Workbook_BeforeSave(ByVal SaveAsUI As Boolean, Cancel As Boolean)

ThisWorkbook.BuiltinDocumentProperties("Author").Value ="Your Name"

End Sub


Every time you save the document, the author name gets set toy Your Name...


However, with the file closed, in Explorer you can still right click, properties, details and change the author details etc.


Not sure if / how to make these changes permanent.


Glen

 

[SirJB7]

Hi, Madhu Gowda!


First of all welcome to Chandoo's website Excel forums. Thank you for your joining us and glad to have you here.


As a starting point I'd recommend you to read the green sticky topics at this forums main page. There you'll find general guidelines about how this site and community operates (introducing yourself, posting files, netiquette rules, and so on).


Among them you're prompted to perform searches within this site before posting, because maybe your question had been answered yet.


Feel free to play with different keywords so as to be led thru a wide variety of articles and posts, and if you don't find anything that solves your problem or guides you towards a solution, you'll always be welcome back here. Tell us what you've done, consider uploading a sample file as recommended, and somebody surely will read your post and help you.


And about your question...


If you haven't performed yet the search herein, try going to the topmost right zone of this page (Custom Search), type the keywords used in Tags field when creating the topic or other proper words and press Search button. You'd retrieve many links from this website, like the following one(s) -if any posted below-, maybe you find useful information and even the solution. If not please advise so as people who read it could get back to you as soon as possible.


Besides what correctly posted imgonna and if it's so important that you preserve unchanged file properties I'm afraid I should agree with him and tell you that the file properties are easily changed by having write access to the file since NTFS doesn't handle any specific protection.


What you could do is something as described here:

http://chandoo.org/forums/topic/user-form-via-qat#post-28628

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/60558749/User%20form%20via%20QAT%20-%20Secured%20workbook%20schema%20%28for%20bobhc%20at%20chandoo.org%29.xlsm


You could replace the initial "splash" worksheet for a modal user form which can hold your unwanted-to-be-changed properties and other relevant data. It's not easy (nor much hard), it's time consuming (measure it against stealth and appropriations), but it's the only way. And better if you encrypt the original properties data, just in case any clever & wise (or only curious guy, like me) tries to tell you that almost nothing is impossible, and mostly if talking about Excel security.


Just advise if any issue.


Regards!