How to protect formulas in excel?

Question

I have a workbook I have created with lots of different formula's. My question is, how can I stop the end user from stealing the formula's? I have had a look at: Protecting Code in an Excel Workbook?

This is generally for VBA. Is there a way to stop users doing this, or is it just worksheet protect and cross your fingers?

Answer 1

You probably should be more specific on what formulas are you trying to protect: Excel Worksheet formulas of the VBA code?

In general, you can create a custom VBA Add-in (ie . xla file) and protect it with password as per Excel documentation. In case your major concerns relate to worksheet function, then you can include them in said VBA add-in using for example, Range.Formula (re: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vba/excel-vba/articles/range-formula-property-excel ) or Range.FormulaArray properties.

Hope this may help.

Answer 2

There is no way to fully protect formulas in Excel. For every password protection type, there is a way to break that protection. The only thing you could do if you really wanted to prevent end-users from getting the formulas is to hard-code the entire sheet before sending it to them. Of course, if the workbook relies on user input and using formulas to output an answer, that won't work.

Do you need the formulas protected for some sort of IP reason, or just to prevent people from messing them up?