Hidden Formula Function

XLS Padlock
1

Hi,

2 Questions:

  1. I do have a spreadsheet with a very significant amount of formulas (a few hundred) that I would like to hide. The workbook does however exist out of a few million cells that are all dependent on iterative solutions of those formula cells. After hiding about 50 formula cells with the xlspadlock hide formula feature I created a protected executable and noticed directly a significant loss in calculation time. Why is that ?

  2. I created after that a file without the xlspadlock hide formula feature but did hide the formula with the standard excel cell properties function and protected the sheet with password and compiled the workbook. In the secure file no formula was shown and there was no loss of calculation speed. Since my workbook depends heavily on CPU my question would be how well is the protection of method 2) compared to method 1) assuming that I would use a sufficiently secure password to protect the sheet before compiling.

Thx
Paul

2

Using formula protection for a large amount of formulas will slow down Excel. This is because additional code (protection code) must be executed each time a formula is calculated, so in your case, method 2 will work fine.

You could also protect some formulas with method 1. The goal is to make your workbook not workable without running the EXE generated by XLS Padlock. So, even if someone successfully gets the source of the workbook, it will become not functional because some protected formulas can’t be recovered.