Software for packaging/compiling Excel Spreadsheets

[mrprobit]

Hi to everyone on the forum, I discovered this place last week and it has been a tremendous resource for me.

A few years ago I sold spreadsheets through my website and made a little bit of cash but then gave up to persue other things in life.

Recently I have discovered that there is still demand for my spreadsheets and possibly someone has stolen my formulas.

However I have substantially updated my spreadsheets and hope to sell them (already have some orders) in.

When I sold them a few years back, I sold them as standard spreadsheets, with all the formulas hidden, all the sheets apart from the interface sheet hidden with password protection (naive I know!).

I know making something 100% secure is impossible, but you have to make it at least as hard as you can for them.

Anyway I looking for some software which will do some or all of the following.

1) Hide my formulas and prevent any access to parts of the sheet where the calculations take part

2) licence key and hardware locking

3) run as an .exe programme

4) run as a standalone application without excel being needed on the users computer, or look as much as possible as if it isn;t running in excel

the spreadsheet has a few simple macro's (but could be discarded if needed) and no VBA coding. All the calculation and functions are just done using regular formulas in the sheets. The one function that the sheet has which will need to be included, is that it runs web queries to extract data from a website of the users choosing.

I've looked at a few things.

Exceleverywhere,which i used in the past to provide demos on my website without any downloading, however this software only supports a few excel functions. the major missing component is running webqueries. Also the code is very exposed.

DoneEx, this seems to do the trick for most things, apart from a standalone application but can hide excel (but this isn't available on the free trial).

does anyone have any experience of DoneEX ? a few threads on this site report some problems ? would it support my web queries function of my sheets.

is there anything else out there that could do some or all of what I want ?

Thanks,

 

[mrprobit]

bump

 

[mrprobit]

ttt

 

[mrprobit]

anyone ? Pleeeeeeeese!

 

[NdNoviceHlp]

HTH. Use a VB6 .exe to instal and then access the excel wb. The VB6 can also then be used to "store" all the nb XL formulas (ie. insert on wb open and then delete on close). Good luck. Dave
http://www.mrexcel.com/forum/showthread.php?t=227700&highlight=vb6

 

[SusaninHouston]

I just finished trying out DoneEx on a large spreadsheet of mine, and thought I'd post my experiences and impressions.

The install procedure and user interface are intuitive and simple. The definitions used to create the compiled code make sense and look like they'll do a great job with the right spreadsheet. But unfortunately, my spreadsheet wasn't right for this app.

Issues I encountered and my analysis thereof:

1) Error right off the bat -- My workbook has a lot of worksheets, some of which I want VeryHidden all of the time, many of which I want hidden some of the time. DoneEx gave me an "unable to set visible property" error on my macros. This could probably be worked around by limiting the scroll area for the really sensitive stuff.

2) Calculation speed -- It tanked. Admittedly, my spreadsheet is large and intricate - almost 10,000 KB in Excel 2003 - and not in the least bloated. Calculations on a workbook of that magnitude went from 'OK' to "Is it working?" slow. And sometimes, it crashed Excel. After the third crash, I gave up.

3) My userforms were slow to load and slow to respond, though they did work and still looked great, which is important for this app.

4) I compiled first from Excel 2003, and the results above were from that experience.

5) I compiled again from Excel 2007, and the resulting file only opened in Excel 2003. When it did open, I got several incompatability error messages that I had already determined not to be problematic in my own testing.


So my overall impression so far -- Promising, and a possibility for small spreadsheets, but not industrial strength. I'll try it on some smaller and simpler models in the next week or so if I can, and post back.

And if anyone has any other suggestions, I'd love to hear them!