A new pink bar warning is appearing in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint telling you that there is a security risk and that your VBA macros have been blocked.
This warning is designed to make you ask, "Is there a valid reason for this person to be sending me a macro?" If there is, I will show you the easy steps to unblock the workbook.
This is called the Mark of the Web.
Kevin Lehrbass Word Game is here: Word Game in Excel | My Spreadsheet Lab
Table of Contents
(0:00) Kevin Lehrbass has a Wordle game in Excel but the macros are blocked with the pink bar.
(1:08) Look at the code
(1:33) How to unblock the macros
(2:10) Dealing with the normal yellow bar.
This warning is designed to make you ask, "Is there a valid reason for this person to be sending me a macro?" If there is, I will show you the easy steps to unblock the workbook.
This is called the Mark of the Web.
Kevin Lehrbass Word Game is here: Word Game in Excel | My Spreadsheet Lab
Table of Contents
(0:00) Kevin Lehrbass has a Wordle game in Excel but the macros are blocked with the pink bar.
(1:08) Look at the code
(1:33) How to unblock the macros
(2:10) Dealing with the normal yellow bar.
Transcript of the video:
Learn Excel from MrExcel Podcast episode 2485. The new pink bar with “Security risk - Microsoft has blocked macros from running”.
Hey, welcome back to the MrExcel netcast.
I am Bill jelen.
You know, I've done a few videos on Wordle and many of you might have seen the YouTube channel for Kevin Lehrbass.
He has 180 Excel videos out there. I've met Kevin before.
I know Kevin and Kevin said “hey, check out this new wordle game that I just put on my blog”.
You know, he replicated Wordle in Excel, which is great, right?
So I download this and I go to open it and this is brand new.
It just started happening last month.
“Security risk: Microsoft has blocked macros from running because of the source of this file is untrusted”.
And it's not specifically that they don't trust Kevin.
Even if I have a workbook and I put it in Dropbox and then download it to my laptop, the same thing happens to me any time that the file came from the web.
So from an email, where I downloaded it, or I went through Dropbox, then we're getting this message.
What do you do?
OK, well, the first thing: if you know anything about VBA, Alt+F11 and go take a look at the code.
If it's unlocked and you can see if there's anything dangerous there, right?
In this case there's not. Second, do you know the person who sent it to you?
Is there a valid reason why they should be sending you macros?
In this case, yeah, there's a great reason why Kevin is sending me this.
I've done a lot of videos on Wordle, and this is a great world game and I love to try it out.
So here's what we're going to do to solve this.
First off, close this workbook. Next up, go find it in Windows Explorer.
There is the Excel.
I am going to right-click and go to Properties, Then down here at the bottom: Security - this file came from another computer and might be blocked to help protect this computer. This is called the “Mark of the Web”.
In order to be able to open this and use the macros, you have to come in here.
Choose unblock, click OK. And now open the file again.
And we get the usual yellow bar that we've always had before, and we can choose to enable content or not.
Why the extra step with the pink bar?
The team at Microsoft says that too many bad actors are using VBA as a means to cause problems.
It's unfortunate because VBA is one of the great reasons why Microsoft Excel beats Google Sheets hands down.
Now with Microsoft making it more difficult for us to use VBA, it closes the gap and tiny bit.
Well hey, for those of you who love to play Wordle, check out Kevin's great blog post.
I'll put the link down in the YouTube description below.
For everyone else who's just here, frustrated that Microsoft is preventing them from running their own macros or macros from someone else” Right-click the file in Explorer, go to Properties and choose the checkbox for unblock.
Well, I want to thank Kevin for sharing that great Wordle game in Excel and I want to thank you for stopping by.
We'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
If you like these videos, please, down below, Like, Subscribe, and Ring the bell.
Feel free to post any questions or comments down in the comments below.
Hey, welcome back to the MrExcel netcast.
I am Bill jelen.
You know, I've done a few videos on Wordle and many of you might have seen the YouTube channel for Kevin Lehrbass.
He has 180 Excel videos out there. I've met Kevin before.
I know Kevin and Kevin said “hey, check out this new wordle game that I just put on my blog”.
You know, he replicated Wordle in Excel, which is great, right?
So I download this and I go to open it and this is brand new.
It just started happening last month.
“Security risk: Microsoft has blocked macros from running because of the source of this file is untrusted”.
And it's not specifically that they don't trust Kevin.
Even if I have a workbook and I put it in Dropbox and then download it to my laptop, the same thing happens to me any time that the file came from the web.
So from an email, where I downloaded it, or I went through Dropbox, then we're getting this message.
What do you do?
OK, well, the first thing: if you know anything about VBA, Alt+F11 and go take a look at the code.
If it's unlocked and you can see if there's anything dangerous there, right?
In this case there's not. Second, do you know the person who sent it to you?
Is there a valid reason why they should be sending you macros?
In this case, yeah, there's a great reason why Kevin is sending me this.
I've done a lot of videos on Wordle, and this is a great world game and I love to try it out.
So here's what we're going to do to solve this.
First off, close this workbook. Next up, go find it in Windows Explorer.
There is the Excel.
I am going to right-click and go to Properties, Then down here at the bottom: Security - this file came from another computer and might be blocked to help protect this computer. This is called the “Mark of the Web”.
In order to be able to open this and use the macros, you have to come in here.
Choose unblock, click OK. And now open the file again.
And we get the usual yellow bar that we've always had before, and we can choose to enable content or not.
Why the extra step with the pink bar?
The team at Microsoft says that too many bad actors are using VBA as a means to cause problems.
It's unfortunate because VBA is one of the great reasons why Microsoft Excel beats Google Sheets hands down.
Now with Microsoft making it more difficult for us to use VBA, it closes the gap and tiny bit.
Well hey, for those of you who love to play Wordle, check out Kevin's great blog post.
I'll put the link down in the YouTube description below.
For everyone else who's just here, frustrated that Microsoft is preventing them from running their own macros or macros from someone else” Right-click the file in Explorer, go to Properties and choose the checkbox for unblock.
Well, I want to thank Kevin for sharing that great Wordle game in Excel and I want to thank you for stopping by.
We'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
If you like these videos, please, down below, Like, Subscribe, and Ring the bell.
Feel free to post any questions or comments down in the comments below.
