Excel Screensaver

[mac_see]

Hi!

I want to put one of my excel report as screensaver. Confused??? I know its a silly question but let me explain the scenario.

My office computers are all WinXP SP2 under corporate group policies applied by the technology department. There is a criteria that if the computer is idle for 5 minutes, it gets locked and you get the windows logon streen asking you to hit CTRL+ALT+DEL to login.

There is no way we can override this as it is a group policy but one way to accomplish this task that I thought of is to send keystrokes so that the
computer will never be idle.

What I want to do is, whenever I move off my computer, I will open by excel report. This macro should keystrokes after evrey 2 minutes so that the computer will be in activity state becuase of which the computer will never be locked.

Now comes the security issue, anybody can exit my file and work on my PC. I don't even want that. This can be resolved only by having a password. If anybody attempts to touch the keyboard keys or click the mouse button, the macro should assume that its time to quit the file and ask for a password before quitting.

Is it a big ask? Is this possible? If yes, can anyone guide me?

This way my report will always be visible to others, my computer will never be locked (overriding security policy) and this entire process will act as a screensaver

Thanks
Maxi

 

[mac_see]

I am not sure if I have explained the scnerio properly. Just wanted to ensure that you all understand my question.

Once I open the report, a macro should run and nothing should happen on any keypress or mouse click. The user will only see my report, nothing should happen any button he presses on the keyboard or clicks the mouse button. The macro should keep on sending keystrokes so that the computer is in activity and it will not lock.

Once I hit Ctrl+SHIFT+X, it should ask for a password to quit. After putting the password, excel should quit and the computer should come back to normal.

Ctrl+Shift+X will act as a hot key to come out of the loop

Maxi

 

[ChrisM]

This sounds like a pretty tall order.

My first thought is you're going to an aweful lot of trouble to circumvent the security your IT dept put in (which was for a reason). I don't think it's a good idea to mess with that.

As an alternative, why not build a macro that takes a screenshot (print screen) of your screen, save it as a jpeg, and use that as your screensaver?

If you insist on going down your route, I can see some ways to prevent users from doing things in Excel, but there is no way to stop them from doing things in Windows unless you incorporate a bunch of API calls to trap user input to Windows.

 

[mac_see]

I spoke to my IT Department to enable screensaver option only for my login but they say that is is not possible, the group policies have been applied for all users on the network and disabling it only for one user would mean taking it out of the group policy which can be missued.

I am not trying to mess up with the seurity policy, the excel report that I am going to show is the performance report of my co-workers and my IT Department is okay with that but it seems there is no way to accomplish both the task at one time.

Per your alternative, I cannot build a macro that takes a screenshot of my screen and save it as a jpeg and further use that as my screensaver as screensavers do not work on any of our logins due to security group policy on Windows.

Two more questions:
1. There is no way to do what I asked for?
2. Does Windows knows the difference between "SendKeys" and an actual keystroke or mouse movement? If yes, then my project will never work.

The purpose of my project is to show the performance report whenever I am not on my computer and nobody should access my computer unless I come and exit the excel workbook with a password.

Maxi

 

[AntFran]

'ello,

quick question...

What happens when someone else opens your report on thier computer and doesn't know the password...?

I've got a few idea's on blocking key pushes and mouse click's, I can even stop them from moving the mouse off of your report to click on the start button but stopping the use of windows keys is a bit tricky with VBA.

also...

Sendkey's wont stop the screensaver anyway... you's need to come up with something cleverer!